Students at Virginia Tech have posted online about 6,000 pages of documents related to the shootings on the campus last year.

The students created the Prevail Archive — which includes prior police reports on the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, and e-mail messages between university officials after the shootings — because they believed the documents “should be freely accessible to the public,” they said on the site.

Under a settlement between Virginia Tech and several families of victims of the attack, the university must share an electronic archive with them, but not necessarily make it available publicly.

Justin M. Harrison, a computer-engineering student, and about 10 volunteers worked in shifts for two days to scan thousands of pages from about 20,000 released by Virginia Tech after a Freedom of Information Act request by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, that newspaper reported.

“It won’t be done for me until I get all the information up there,” Mr. Harrison told the Times-Dispatch, “so people can see with their own eyes what happened.” —Sara Lipka