Students read the descriptive data of documents found (title, author, associated keywords, summaries, etc.), locate and access them, whether they are digital or paper documents.

To do so, they use different access, display, display and search functions. This stage takes the form of a quick scan of tagged documents.

Students can present the following:

• A preliminary list of results sorted by search engine and relevance, date or source, depending on the objective of the assignment;
• Either a scan or screenshot of selected texts.

To complete this task, students may use the following tools:

• Catalogues of works in libraries;
• Descriptive data (metadata) of documents found (title, author, associated keywords, summary, etc.);
• Online support for using a proxy server required by their academic institution in order to access full text documents externally.

Metadata: Data which describes other data. For example, a description of a database in terms of its structure and the relationship between the entities in the database is an example of metadata. (Source: Oxford reference).

Even though we are moving towards a paperless system, documentation that is relevant to an assignment is not always found in a digital format. It is important to encourage students to find and use paper documentation if at all relevant to the objective of the assignment.