The Richmond-Times Dispatch wrote an investigative piece claiming that Virginia Tech was hiding information and not fully disclosing materials that the families of the victims had wanted disclosed. The files were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to the report, many of these records relate to notes taken by senior officials at an emergency meeting the day of the shootings, and records about the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, such as notes and e-mails from concerned professors.

The article also said the university documents, at present, do not contain information about faculty, police or counselor interactions with Cho.

The files were accompanied by a brief note that copies of Cho's counseling records were inadvertently destroyed, a complaint that Cho's past psychological history, dating back to middle school, had not been shared with Tech. The only police reports were related to two stalking incidents in 2005 in addition to a suicide attempt that led to hospitalization that same year.

On June 17, the Richmond Circuit Court reviewed financial settlements for 24 wrongful death suits related to the April 16 shootings at Tech.

The court reached a decision to approve awarding $100,000 and medical expenses to the families of the victims.

The settlement with the families, reached last month, also requires that a public archive be created with key facts about the shootings.

According to university spokesman Larry Hincker, reporters from the Richmond-Times Dispatch asked to see what information had been shared with lawyers.

The university has six months to create the archive, which will include e-mails sent by university officials. At the time of the Dispatch's article the archive was still being created, Hincker said.

Hincker believes that the reporters for the Richmond-Times Dispatch were upset that they were not looking at the archives.  "Decisions about what to be put in the archives have not been made yet," Hincker said.

"The reporters were looking at raw material, just pieces of information, and making unusual assertions," Hincker said.

One example Hincker gave was related to the article's claim that there was a door unlocked to get into Norris Hall, claiming that it would have saved police time to go through this entrance. The door the article refers to is an underground passage between Norris and Holden Hall.

"It is a red herring," Hincker said, "according to the governor's panel, this was not an entrance into Norris."

Overall, Hincker said, "Little things were bothersome – they looked at 10,000 pages of raw data and have loose ends that need to be tied up." Hincker also added that many of the assertions in the Richmond Times-Dispatch article were addressed by the governors' panel about the shootings.

Currently, work is going into creating the archives for the April 16 shootings.  The overall process for creating the archives cannot take longer than six months from the time of the settlement.

Hincker indicated that one of the components going into the archives are university e-mails.

These e-mails are currently encrypted in hard drives and need to be pulled out and put in the archive.

Lawyers for the university are taking the lead in putting together a team to organize and create the archive.

As far as omitting materials from the archive, Hincker said, "There are certain exemptions that guide us."

Most of these exemptions revolve around giving out personal information about students.

There are no plans, as of yet, for the location of this archive or if it will be made available online.

Calls to the Richmond Times-Dispatch were directed to Peggy Bellows, the managing editor.  No phone calls were returned.