Virginia Tech’s April 16th archive to open Monday

Virginia Tech will open to the public on Monday an archive of documents related to the April 16, 2007, shootings.

Tech senior Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and professors that day in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

The university made the documents available to victims and families in mid-December. The public archive contains all those records except for personal documents specific to any victims, such as financial aid records and transcripts.

The archive contains records and e-mail correspondence related to Cho and his Virginia Tech academic career, records and e-mail correspondence from the university policy group on April 16-17, and the university’s recovery efforts in days immediately following the shootings.

Legal settlements with victims and families of the deceased required Tech to maintain an electronic archive of records related to April 16.

The public can inspect the archive on two computer terminals, one located on the second floor of the Newman Library on the Virginia Tech campus and the other on the second floor of the Library of Virginia in Richmond.

The archive is not catalogued or organized.

Users can retrieve documents only through keyword searches, much like a Web search engine.