As I began my search for an internship, I was searching for a place to work that was either a museum or a library and I was not expecting to find a facility that housed both. In 1957, Harry Ransom established the Humanities Research Center and started to gather rare books and manuscripts for the HRC to house. Throughout the years, and practically every year, the HRC has acquired a variety of the humanity topics under the listings of: art, photography, performing arts, literature, film, and “other” which currently consists of French, Italian, and Decorative Arts.
Thomas F. Staley is the current director who continues to oversee the growth for the Center like his predecessors. He understands the HRC’s priorities to obtain the reputation for being the facility to house rare books, manuscripts, etc. to collect and use for scholarly research and preservation. It has not been until this decade that the Ransom Center has introduced its gallery, viewing rooms, and theater where now we have a more easily accessible facility for researchers, galleries for groups of the public to view for free, and a theater which puts on productions of movies, lectures, performances, and music for the public and educational programs every year. This facility is not just for academic scholars but for the “every man” to come and experience knowledge from our past and culture.
Whenever a guest asked me “what is this place?” I always respond that “the Harry Ransom Center is a humanities research library and museum.” The 1st floor comprises our museum, 2nd floor which comprises of our Reading Room (the library), and our 3rd and 4th floors are offices with a few special rooms that are used for meetings and/or viewing. The 5th, 6th, and 7th floors are off limits to the public, including me; there is a separate elevator, past the security guards that leads to those floors since they are strictly for faculty that works with the artifacts. The 5th and 6th floors has props from movies like a pair of gigantic shears from a Alfred Hitchcock film, documents, manuscripts (with the actors’ notes), films, and art drawings from films like “Gone With the Wind”. The 7th floor has a few rooms with rare books to view and a very nice silver collection. The basement is a storage unit for artwork (first editions, original pieces from artist, props for and from future and past exhibitions, and Frankenstein’s monster (a life size mold of Robert De Niro, as the creature in the 1994 film, secured in a crate).
My responsibilities were to work at the visitor service desk, to answer and provide visitor services, and provide my docent responsibilities where I gave tours to whomever wanted or needed them. This meant learning everything and more about the exhibit and the Ransom Center. I also assisted by getting the word out to schools, librarians, teachers, and businesses about what the HRC has to offer. I create hundreds of envelopes filled with books, pamphlets, posters, etc. and I did research on reaching the public, made quick reference sheets for the docents, and developed an interactive tour for the children.
One of my most exciting moments was giving a tour on “Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works.” This was my first tour. My group was a high school class from the private holistic Khabele School who are studying astronomy; these were students who already had intricate knowledge about the exhibition. It was a very insightful tour with a lot of brilliant students telling what they already knew about astronomy and what they will be learning from their teacher throughout the semester. A docent volunteers their own time to their facility and they must be on top of the knowledge being presented or they will look foolish personally and to the facility. Docents still have to apply for the position like a paid job and go through interviews to be accepted to volunteer.
There are two permanent exhibits located on the first floor of the HRC. The Gutenberg Bible is one of them. The Bible is a very rare piece in the world and therefore valuable to the Ransom Center. Harry Ransom always wanted to acquire one of these books simply because of its history and being the foundation of technology today with printing. This book was created by Johann Gutenberg between 1454 and 1455. Originally to acquire a Bible, one would have to go to a scribe, pay up front, and wait about twenty years for the process to be completed. Gutenberg made 150-180 copies of the Bible, which was first called the 42-line Bible.
The First Photograph was invented in 1826 by a man named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He was a terrible drawer and so he decided to create a way to copy and therefore save an image without having to illustrate it. He was interested in copying engravings from centuries before, in layman’s terms he wanted to take (what we call now) a picture of an original engraving. He tried many experiments and his first success was using a pewter plate as the base and Bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum) as the chemical to produce the image. Using a camera obscura box he placed the pewter plate with the Bitumen of Judea inside the box. For an eight hour period the sunlight shone into the camera obscura box allowing the image from the outside to harden onto the pewter plate. Afterwards, Niépce took two chemicals, oil of lavender and white petroleum, to wash the remaining unhardened Bitumen of Judea off the pewter plate. The lighter substance seen on the photograph is the Bitumen of Judea and the darker parts are the pewter plate.