Intermedia, a hypermedia system developed at Brown University's Institute for Research (Rhode Island) in Information and Scholarship, is first described, and then used as a case study to explore a number of key issues that software designers must consider in the development of hypermedia document systems. A hypermedia document system is defined as a system that provides a set of tools which allow authors to share a network of linked documents, link their own and others' documents together, leave notes for one another, and retrieve information stored in documents of different types. The major issues addressed include various design options for linking together multimedia documents, the contexts in which those links exist, and the need for visual representation of the links that exist within a given context. Twenty-one figures illustrate the text. (28 references) (Author/EW)