The work is devoted to the substantiation of new research methods used to examine the writer's creative heritage and the concept of Dostoevsky's digital archive. The first part of the article provides examples of the use of online information technologies to create electronic archives of literary and historical texts from different eras, highlight the distinct and common features of the created archival collections, and analyze the principles of material presentation. The material for this part of the research was obtained from the most respectable foreign and Russian Internet portals, which display historical and literary collections and funds associated with various cultural traditions and personas. Each such electronic collection was created on the basis of extensive, sometimes decades-long, scientific work aimed at collecting handwritten and printed sources, restoring handwritten materials, their textual research, studying their creative and non-creative history, determining the methodology of working with them and the concept of their textual and digital reproduction, as well as extensive preparatory work on the selection of technical equipment and digitization of texts. In most cases, such digital archives are not only a place to store sources; they continue to serve research purposes and contain the results and examples of scientific research. In the second part of the article, the tasks of the Dostoevsky digital archive as a collection of texts and a scientific laboratory for the study of the writer's handwritten and printed heritage are formulated. The article substantiates the first stage of research work on the creation of a catalog of Dostoevsky's verbal and non-verbal graphics, based on the combination of modern software methods and textual analysis.