Classics from the 1960s appear in coffee-stained fragments, their author still working out lines that generations of fans would come to know by heart. (“You know something’s happening here but you,” reads a scribbled early copy of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” omitting “don’t know what it is” and the song’s famous punch line: “Do you, Mister Jones?”) The range of hotel stationery suggests an obsessive self-editor in constant motion.

And while the archive is a further step in the canonization of Mr. Dylan, now 74, as not just a musical icon but also an American literary giant, the documents are tantalizing in what they do not reveal. A card from Barbra Streisand postmarked November 1978, for example, thanks Mr. Dylan for sending flowers and playfully suggests that they make a record together; there is no evidence of a response.

For longtime students, seeing the archive may conjure a familiar feeling of astonishment at just how deep the well of Dylanology goes. There is always far more beneath the surface than anyone could guess. One example of this phenomenon — and of how radically the material could change existing Dylan scholarship — is the “Blood on the Tracks” material.

The “little red notebook,” which by most accounts was stolen from Mr. Dylan at some point, circulated among collectors and is now held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, with access severely restricted. But the existence of two more books shows how much raw material has been unavailable and unknown for study. The song “Tangled Up in Blue,” with its refracted scenes of a wanderer haunted by a broken relationship, gets a slightly more picaresque telling here, with a refrain absent from the finished recording: “Wish I could lose, these dusty sweatbox blues.” Even in songs that have been pored over for decades, new layers of meaning await discovery.