A deal reached Friday for a consortium of Atlanta individuals and businesses to pay $32 million to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Estate for a valuable collection of King’s papers leaves major questions unanswered, including what institution will house the papers and preserve them, how access to them will be granted, and what will happen to other civil rights documents not included in the auction.

The King collection was supposed to be auctioned on June 30 by Sotheby’s, which had expected it to sell for between $15 million and $30 million. But King scholars warned that the conditions of the sale – namely, that the Estate retained copyright – made research institutions wary.

For now, title to the collection belongs to a subsidiary of an organization called the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, which was the recipient of a loan for the full amount from SunTrust Banks. The city of Atlanta has gotten either pledges or loan guarantees from corporations and individuals including Coca-Cola; Home Depot; Turner Broadcasting; Georgia Power; Wal-Mart; a minority builder, Herman Russell; and a former Georgia governor, Roy Barnes. The Community Foundation expects to be able to repay the loan in two years, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Title will eventually be transferred to Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, but where the collection will actually be housed, in either the short or the long term, has not been decided, the president of Morehouse, Walter Massey, said in an interview with The New York Sun. Morehouse itself does not have an archive. Mr. Massey said the collection may be housed in the short term at the Atlanta History Center, the University of Georgia, or the Robert W. Woodruff Library, a central library shared by the black colleges in Atlanta.

Individuals involved in the negotiations would not discuss specific terms of the deal, because of a confidentiality agreement they had signed. But it was clear from what they would say that major details have yet to be resolved – a fact that worries scholars who consider the fine print of this deal to be crucial.

“The deal basically requires that the collection be made available to the public through certain institutions that can participate in the display of the collection,” said the lawyer who represented the Community Foundation in negotiations, Benjamin White. “There were certain named organizations, and the King Estate has the right to approve additional organizations. This is something that those organizations are going to have to work out among themselves, with guidance from Morehouse and the mayor and community leaders.”

He said, “The deal was thrown together so quickly that we just didn’t have time to think about every possibility out there.”

Mr. Massey mentioned the possibility that Morehouse would build an archive – a project that would require another huge fundraising campaign – while Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has said that she would like Atlanta to build a civil-rights museum.

Before this deal was announced, scholars had raised concerns about the King Estate’s insistence on maintaining copyright to the collection, as it will in this deal. As part of offering the collection for auction last week, Sotheby’s was providing to interested institutions a list of conditions, which included a clause stating that no one could quote “the text of any of Dr. King’s copyrighted speeches, sermons, books or other writings, in whole or in part, without the express written consent of the Estate.”

Emory University, which originally offered assistance to the consortium, and which unlike Morehouse, does have its own substantial archive of African-American manuscripts, had concerns regarding fair-use and access to the papers, but hasn’t yet seen the final terms or resolved the question of its possible involvement. “Al though Emory did see the intellectual property use terms sheet available through Sotheby’s and sought clarifications, the final terms have not yet been made available to us,” the president of Emory, James Wagner, wrote in an e-mail.

“We don’t know what our role will be,” an Emory spokeswoman added. “We haven’t seen the agreement. I imagine we’ll be getting more clarification in the weeks ahead.”

Mr. Massey of Morehouse described the final terms as “the kind of terms that an academic institution would want to have,” and said Morehouse “will be able to allow access for scholarly and academic use.”

But Morehouse’s handling of other historical papers leaves some scholars concerned about how it will handle access to the King papers. According to a civil rights historian, Ralph Luker, Morehouse has 40 boxes of uncataloged papers belonging to its former president, Benjamin Mays, to which scholars have not had access.

“Given the precedent of how the Mays papers have been handled over there, it just doesn’t give much reassurance to scholars about how the King papers might be handled,” Mr. Luker said.

Mr. Massey said he couldn’t answer questions about the Mays papers.

Perhaps the largest unresolved issue, which many interviewed about the Atlanta deal were not aware of, is that this $32 million collection represents only a fraction of King’s papers – a limited selection of documents with either King’s handwriting or other famous people’s signatures.

The non-holographic King papers, as well as a huge collection of papers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and papers and oral histories donated by other major civil rights figures, remain at the King Center, an institution run by the King Estate, which the Estate wants to sell, possibly to the federal government. According to the National Park Service, the Center needs $11 million in repairs, and scholars are particularly worried about the condition of the Center’s archives. Several mentioned that the roof leaks, and that hours are inconsistent.

“The papers aren’t readily available as they would be in a normal library, and they aren’t physically safe,” said a leader of the civil rights movement, Julian Bond. “My cousin designed that building, and it’s not his fault, but it leaks. I’ve heard stories of plastic sheeting having to be placed over King’s papers.”

The King Center did not return calls for comment.

Scholars worry that, because the collectible documents have been plucked, there is no financial reason for anyone to look after the fate of the material that remains at the King Center.

“It is equally and, frankly, more important for the rest of those collections to be rescued, because they don’t have any auction value; nobody’s going to make money off those,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of King, David Garrow, said. “That’s the really awful, damaging downside to this cherry-picking: Every single piece of paper that has independent monetary value has been lifted and separated and made a saleable commodity, and the 99 percent of papers that don’t have autograph value remain marooned and abandoned.”

Another Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of King, Taylor Branch, said he had hoped that a deal for the Sotheby’s collection would include the papers at the King Center, as well. The Sotheby’s collection “is only a small fraction of the King papers, let alone the SCLC papers,” he said. “Major figures from the civil rights movement donated their papers, hoping the King Center was going to be like the Library of Congress. Instead, they’re getting leaked on and forgotten. We’ve missed an opportunity to truly take care of all of this, while people were raising money.”

Asked whether there was any plan to reunite the Sotheby’s collection with the collections remaining at the King Center, Mr. White said he didn’t know what those were. “Our understanding is that this is essentially the entire King collection,” he said. “It’s been represented to us that that is essentially all there is.”