To provide the document information management system which can obtain sufficient display capability for a request to display a document and can display the invariably latest document even when the document is deleted, updated, or moved on a host computer side.

When document body information is requested, a work station 2 performs retrieval to find whether or not the requested document body information is present in a cache file 26, and requests the host computer to transfer the requested document body information when the information is absent or compares the latest update times of a local document information management table 24 and a host document information management table with each other when the information is present; when they are not equal each other, the document body information is transferred from the host computer and when they are equal each other, the document body information is read in from the cache file 26.