NEW YORK: A trove of thousands of Bob Dylan notebooks and other artifacts — mostly unknown except to the rock icon himself — will head to a US university to be preserved for posterity. The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma announced Wednesday that it had acquired more than 6,000 items from the singer’s six-decade career and would create the Bob Dylan Archive.

The archive will eventually go on permanent display in Tulsa near a recently built museum to Woody Guthrie, the folk legend and Dylan influence who was born in Oklahoma, a Great Plains state that was once Indian territory.

“I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American nations,” Dylan, who is famously taciturn when not singing, said in a statement.

“To me it makes a lot of sense, and it’s a great honor,” said the 74-year-old, revered as one of the most influential living US musicians.

Early handwritten drafts of his songs have long been studied by “Dylanologists,” but few of them were aware of the vast extent of the collection.

Among the items in the archive that were rumored but had not been seen in the public realm is a notebook in which Dylan penned lyrics for his 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks,” as he conversed with the New York painter Norman Raeben.