Abstract: The disclosed technology enhances the granularity of access control systems by indexing electronic documents of interest in a manner that selectively provides authorized users with access to either content or metadata of such documents. Restriction indicia corresponding to, for example, a full-access permission and a limited-access permission, are assigned to an electronic document and this restriction indicia is compared with a user's authorization level to determine whether the user should be granted full access to the electronic document's content or be granted a limited access restricted to the document's metadata.