And especially since 2004, when Steve Knutson’s Audika label started issuing carefully prepared releases of Russell’s known and unknown music, he has become central to the education of young pop bands and musicians looking toward pop’s center from the outside. Those include Grizzly Bear, Julianna Barwick, James Blake, Cate Le Bon, Mica Levi and Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange. And the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will announce shortly that it has acquired Russell’s archives, giving a new generation an unusual opportunity to try to decipher the work of a musician The Times called “the kind of genre-busting artist who defined downtown New York City in the 1970s and ’80s.”

Concerning the archive, Ms. Barwick wrote in an email recently that “it will be like a look into his mind,” adding: “I want to know more about his process. With such varied works, were the processes similar? Or were they different every time?”

She’ll soon be able to find out.

The library acquired the archive — 166 linear feet — from Russell’s estate, which is shepherded by Tom Lee, Russell’s partner. (The library doesn’t comment on the terms of its acquisitions.) It includes a thousand-or-so reels, cassettes, DATs, Beta and VHS tapes with hundreds of hours of unreleased and probably unreleasable material, representing how Russell made his work — laying down individual tracks, or practicing, or jamming — often in long sessions, and with musicians who may have had little idea what they were working on at the time. He kept many versions of songs. One example in the collection, recorded on a TDK-90 cassette tape over remixes of Salsoul-label disco by Walter Gibbons, contains a version of Russell’s song “My Tiger My Timing” sung with Jennifer Warnes. It becomes a long mantra of blissful pop hooks: practice becoming ritual, extended over a whole side of a tape.

These sorts of items may be crucial to understanding Russell. After the paper material is assessed and cataloged with the proper metadata some months from now, anyone interested will be able to come to the library’s division of music and recorded sound to look through it. All the tapes will be digitized and cataloged as well — a process that may take as long as a year, according to Jonathan Hiam, the library’s curator for the project — but then will be available for onsite listening. (While the library has been collecting broad amounts of American-music material back to the 1930s, including the papers of John Cage, Henry Cowell, Benny Goodman and Pauline Oliveros, Mr. Hiam said that its next major focus is music of the late 1970s and beyond, both popular and classical; the Russell archive may be a test case for how to do it right.)