A document management system having enhanced operability so that a plurality of documents can be processed at a time by integrating a search operation, an image recording operation, and an index input operation. In the document management system of the present invention, input search conditions are transmitted to a search portion, which finds out a document satisfying the search conditions from a document data base via an index data recording management portion and outputs the result to a document list control portion. The document list control portion prepares a document list from the result and displays it in a document list display portion. For a new record processing, image data on a manuscript read by a scanner is output to an image control portion. The image control portion records the image data into an image recording portion and reports new document creating information to the document list control portion. The document list control portion creates a new record on the basis of the new document creating information and adds it to an already displayed document list for a display.