A recent donation to the Indiana University Lilly Library brings Hoosiers closer than ever to the final frontier.
The archival library at IU’s Bloomington campus has long had a Star Trek collection. When IU faculty member Ben Motz found out about it, he knew it was the right place for something he'd had in his closet since he was 12: A pair of latex Spock ears he’d gotten as a gift for his sixth grade graduation.
"I treasured it in a way that a Star Trek fan and a kid who’s in reverence of this thing would have," Motz says.
Leonard Nimoy played the pointy-eared Vulcan Spock on the original series and in several films. This pair of ears was part of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
"This was not something that I imagined myself holding onto forever because I thought it was important," Motz says. "That really was like, ahh, this thing that I thought would ultimately end up in a collection somewhere, it could be right here."
Rebecca Baumann is the Head of Public Services at the Lilly Library. She hopes the Spock ears will bring in more people eager to dig into the dozens of boxes in the Star Trek collection, which includes the original prospectus for the Star Trek series from 1964.
"This is the pitch for the show, which simply put is a wagon train to the stars," Baumann says.
The collection also includes scripts from every episode of the original series, and The Next Generation. Jeri Taylor – an IU alum who co-created the Star Trek: Voyager series – donated a lot of it.
Voyager Captain Kathryn Janeway is even from Bloomington.
Baumann says the values of IU and the Lilly Library are mirrored in Star Trek.
"The show really encourages curiosity and exploration and that is what we want to do as well," she says. "One of the Vulcan sayings is 'Infinite diversity in infinite combination' and I feel like that could be a pretty good motto for the Lilly Library because we have such rich diversity of collections and stories that they have to tell."
All collections at the Lilly Library, including Spock’s pointy ears, are open to the public.
