This paper starts by describing the experiences the authors recently had with online information systems for teaching and research in palaeography. The study also considers the differences in the students' access to the site "Teaching Materials for Latin Palaeography" when they attended the palaeography courses, as it was usually used in the lectures by one of the authors. With the increase in the quantity of plates (reproducing pages or parts of them from medieval manuscripts) and texts (concerning the analysis of the writing styles, the cataloguing, the history of manuscripts, the codicology and other important topics in the palaeography's scientific debate), it became clear that there was a difference in the way students approached those materials: when students first used the systems in the academic year 2001/2002, they read all the documents and used all the plates; more recently, with the quantity of materials on the site considerably increased, the students wait for the professor's suggestions and evidence uncertainties and difficulties when autonomously looking for a document or a plate. As a consequence, the online information system Digistylus has been planned and is going to be created for the management of the data in the site "Teaching Materials". The main consequence of the above observations has been the detection of a new knowledge construction paradigm and the development of new research procedures in palaeography
