Access to a stored item of data is provided by using a manually positionable scanner (506) to scan one or more regions of a sheet and to provide a scan signal. The sheet bears machine-readable markings that define two or more zones of the sheet (108); the markings (204) within each zone indicating a position of the zone within the sheet. The scan signal is used to obtain position data indicating one or more positions indicated by the machine readable markings (606). One or more positions indicated by the position data are encoded with time information to obtain encoded position-time data. Time data indicating the time information are associated with the stored item of data to provide access to the stored item of data using the encoded position-time data.
