Abstract: Reducing the number of inquiries required to determine access rights accorded to documents, in particular documents stored at a Web site, is disclosed. Upon receipt of a request for documents, a list of the documents is opened by the receiving server and data denoting the user access level of every document on the list is determined. Then, the resulting series of access levels is filtered to remove any access levels not available to the requestor. Next, a document query, including as a condition that any returned list of documents only include documents having an access level included on the filtered series of access levels, is generated. The resulting document data is then embedded in a Web page and sent to the requestor.