ABSTRACT
William J. Mitchell was an internationally renowned scholar of urbanism and digital design. The William J. Mitchell archive, held at the University of Melbourne, offers an insight into the complexities of processing and conserving hybrid paper/digital collections. When William J. (Bill) Mitchell died in 2010, he left an archive of his work as a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and a leading thinker in the emergence of digital urbanism. Computer-aided design in architecture emerged in the 1960s. Foundational work was carried out at several universities and initial systems were operational by the 1970s. The field was given definition in Mitchell’s 1977 survey, ‘Computer-Aided Architectural Design’. The Mitchell collection was the University of Melbourne’s first significant architectural hybrid physical/digital archive. At the time of its donation to the University of Melbourne in 2012, there were no roadmaps for handling such archives, nor examples to follow.
