In this paper, we present a document metaphor called Living Documents for accessing and searching for digital documents in modern distributed information systems. Our approach is based upon a finegrained document concept which glues computational services, data and meta data together. Viewing documents as micro servers is particularly well suited in environments where the document’s content is changing continuously and frequently. Based on a case study of an existing state-of-the-art Web application, we show how to transform database-centric information systems into a hypertext of inter-linked Living Documents. We also discuss how to effectively use traditional as well as Web information retrieval techniques, namely topic distillation, in such hypertext environment. In particular, an extended version of Kleinberg’s [11] algorithm is presented.