Using Flanagan's (1954) Critical Incident Technique, the students' final year project became the focus of inquiry, and engineering students were interviewed about their information seeking relating to their final year project. Permission was granted by programme co-ordinators and instructors for the researcher to make a brief statement about the study to the students in each engineering programme and to invite students to volunteer to participate. Students wishing to participate contacted the researcher and received a Letter of Information outlining the study. To explore changing patterns of information seeking and strategies, each student participated in two semi-structured interviews, one at the beginning of his or her project and a follow-up interview at the end of the project. Each participant was asked to describe what they did in seeking information for this project, the first source they consulted and any other sources they used. Their final year project was an appropriate critical incident, since it was easily identifiable as a specific task and had to be completed by all participants.