There are many strange and wonderful collections scattered across Indiana's many universities, but none are quite as fantastic as the Ray Bradbury Center at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis.

>> The Ray Bradbury Center is a very large single author archive.

We have a wonderful mix of his personal effects and things that he was writing professionally.

He's one of the most widely translated authors in the world.

I believe we've got over 40 languages represented in our reference library.

>> Ray Bradbury was a 20th century science fiction and pop culture icon.

Many of us are likely familiar with his writing from a high school or college English course.

Fahrenheit 451 , a dystopian novel about a totalitarian society obsessed with burning books, is a classroom staple.

Bradbury's long and wide-ranging career began in 1941, when his short story "Pendulum" was published in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories .

He kept at it for the next 70 years, publishing dozens of books and hundreds of short stories.

>> Look.

>> He worked on Hollywood films, such as It Came from Outer Space , >> Now hear me.

>>>and John Huston's classic Moby Dick .

>> Youre to look... for the white whale.

>> Burn it.

>> And his works have spawned countless film and television adaptations.

>>> Weve burned almost every physical book in the country.

>> He had a remarkable career, seven decades as a professional writer.

And the collection is literally exploding with vestiges from every part of his career.

>> But why, you ask, is this writer's repository here?

Bradbury wasn't from Indiana.

He never lived here, and he never taught here.

The Ray Bradbury Center is here largely because of this man.

>> Jonathan R. Eller.

>> Jonathan Eller's relationship with Ray Bradbury goes back to the late 1980s when he hosted the sci-fi superstar during a science fiction conference at the Air Force Academy where he was teaching.

>> Well, it was like meeting Santa Claus.

It was like meeting someone you know in legend and mythology or through literature.

From then on, I just felt that it was important to go ahead and begin to do the academic work required to continue to understand Ray Bradbury and document his life and his amazing career on into the next century.

>> In 1993, Eller moved to Indianapolis to teach in the English department at IUPUI.

There he met William Touponce, a professor, who, as fate would have it, was also a Bradbury scholar.

In 2007, the two academics persuaded the university to establish the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.

>> He was already an icon, but we wanted to make sure that he would be around in the 21st century and beyond, because his themes were so timeless and universal.

But we wanted to grow that more into the literary mainstream and the academic mainstream.

>> At first, the center wasn't much more than the new Ray Bradbury Review, an annual collection of essays, surveying the writer's cultural impact.

For his part, Eller began a lengthy three-part biography of Bradbury, and through regular visits to his home in Los Angeles, he came to know the famed futurist on a personal level.

When Bradbury died in 2012, his family, along with biographer Donn Albright, agreed that the Bradbury Center would be the perfect place to receive much of Bradbury's papers and artifacts.

>> That changed, of course, the Bradbury Center into a destination, but it also changed -- psychologically, it changed me and others who were close to Ray Bradbury, because now it was a house that still had his magic in it, but now it also had his benign and inspiring ghost as well.

>> Walking into the center, one might be forgiven for believing that that inspiring ghost followed the 18,000 pounds of professional and personal belongings shipped from Bradbury's home.

>> We wanted that space to be special for visitors on -- on more than one level.

People, we expected, would want to see copies of his books, his own copies of his books.

His own working office references, and they did.

They wanted to see these things and touch these things, and in some cases, they can touch these things.

We also wanted them to see the treasures that inspired Ray Bradbury.

>> Eller and his team even went so far as to recreate Bradbury's basement office where he did much of his writing.

>> Ray Bradbury often would just let his subconscious bring up story ideas, objects.

Or he'd look around his office and see things.

>> Ill never starve here.

I just look around, find what I and begin.

>>> And we wanted people to have Ray Bradbury experience.

>> Although it's been more than a decade since the center received Bradbury's belongs.

>> I am Dr. Jason Aukerman.

>> Jason Aukerman, who took over as director of the renamed Bradbury Center, says there's still much to do.

>> Bradbury had a very reactive filing system, which is our very, very polite way of saying he didn't really have a system.

He was not -- not a well-organized writer.

So you open one of these drawers, and you are not really sure what you are gonna find.

>> Which has led to some surprising discoveries.

Such as an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back .

Bradbury, it turns out, had been asked to guarantee the work of his terminally ill friend and colleague, Leigh Brackett.

>> If you see the fine print right here, it says this needs to come back to the studio.

He probably had quite a few different drafts that he was keeping up with.

This one just happened to get stuffed in a drawer and forgotten about.

>> These days, the Bradbury Center, much like the man himself, is focused on the future.

Aukerman hopes to one day raise enough funds to move everything into a museum-quality space which will better protect the collection and make it easier to host visiting scholars and members of the public.

>> We're barely scratching the surface of what the Bradbury Center could be.

I mean, it's such an amazing resource.

The collection is valued at over $7.8 million.

We've got art from Jack Kirby in here.

We've got letters from Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, and teachers and students and fans.

We've got 40 years of incoming correspondence for Ray Bradbury, and these things all shed a light on how essential his role was, and we want to keep the spark of Ray Bradbury's imagination alive.