AUSTIN (AP) - Exxon Mobil Corp. has confirmed that it has approached the University of Texas about housing its historical archives, including some of the papers of John D. Rockefeller and correspondence to the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh about the properties of motor oil.

Discussions also are underway with other universities and museums about the collection valued at $3.5 million.

"We certainly prefer that it would all go to one institution," said company spokesman Tom Cirigliano. "Texas is the home of Exxon Mobil, and these are Exxon Mobil artifacts. We have a rich history here in Texas. So from that standpoint, UT would be one of the natural places to look at."

The archives would be a prize for the university, which itself was built on oil wealth. Oil revenue from UT's West Texas lands, as well as proceeds from the investment of that revenue, have created a multibillion-dollar endowment benefit creating the UT System and the Texas A&M University System.

The Exxon Mobil collection includes posters, publications, videotapes, more than 1 million photographs and about 7,000 three-dimensional artifacts such as signs and gas pumps, the Austin American-Statesman reported on its Thursday editions.

Some of the material has to do with the 1870 creation and subsequent expansion of the original Standard Oil Co., the corporate ancestor of Exxon, Mobil and other oil companies.

The letters to Wilbur and Orville Wright to Lindbergh have to do with the properties of oil in their airplanes. The Wright brothers made the first successful sustained power flights in a heavier-than-air machine in 1903. Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927.

"It's sort of mind-boggling in its richness," Don Carleton, director of UT's Center for American History, said of the collection. For example, the collection includes all of the companies' television ads since the 1950s, he said.

Exxon Mobil would not name the other universities and museums it has approached, but Carleton said it was his understanding that UT's competition includes Duke University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Delaware, the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress.