The challenges of the digital revolution need critical rethinking the usual functions of the university libraries and to establish what characteristics it must have in order to adapt effectively to the new technological situation.The article analyzes the reasons for the frequent lack of demand by researchers of digitized textual heritage and presents the idea of a problem-thematic online resource “Reconstructing the Reader: a Rare Book Collection in the Regional Cultural Landscape” developed by the Laboratory for Library and Communicative Studies (Tomsk State University).Conceptually, its implementation aims at overcoming the positivistic approach to the library as a “repository of information on paper and electronic medium”, and in practice — at identifying the ways to integrate the university libraries into a new format of scientific knowledge and scholarly communications.