The article is devoted to the study of publications in the field of sources of Russian history, the famous Enlightener of the XVIII century Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov (1744-1818). Based on a wide range of sources and literature, authors show how the idea of N.I. Novikov, an archaeographer in Russian historiography, changed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The old, pre-revolutionary historiography, paying tribute to N.I. Novikov as a collector and publisher of historical material, was very skeptical at the same time assessing the scientific level of his publications as not meeting the elementary scientific requirements. Nevertheless, already in the 1950s - 1960s, in a fundamentally different historiographic situation, in the wake of the struggle for the priority of Russian and Soviet scientists in the formation and development of Russian science and culture, the former claims to N.I. Novikov, in this regard, were forgotten, and he himself was proclaimed the largest archaeographer of the 18th century, who first developed a systematic set of rules for the publication of historical sources, which formed the basis for the further development of Russian archeography. The authors focus on the most valuable part of the historical material published in the Ancient Russian Vivliofik (DRV) - spiritual and contractual charters of the great and specific princes of the 14th - 16th centuries. Not having the originals at hand, the preparation of the text of the letters to the press N.I. Novikov had to carry out according to their archival copies, and the archaeographic design - on the basis of brief and often random indications about the author and the addressee of the letters, peculiarities of their appearance, availability Stamps, litter, etc. Therefore, to speak of a certain special contribution of N.I. Novikov in the development of methods of text transmission and archaeographic design, published by him in the DRV documents, the authors conclude, it is not necessary. Another thing - N.I. Novikov, as a collector and the first publisher of historical material. Here his merits are really difficult to overestimate.