Facebook groups were a great source of information regarding the status of people on campus. The group "I'm ok at VT" garnered a lot of attention as students and staff used the group to share their status and gain information about the status of others. 

Facebook "I'm ok at VT"

1.  Newsfeeds
2. Social networks (Wikipedia, Facebook, Myspace, etc.)
3. Blogs and other unofficial newsfeeds

Albion College

Data gathering happed a few hours after the first media report. Monitoring of official and unofficial news reports began. The information gained led to the monitoring of student-based information gained from student and college websites and social media.
 
Face-to-face individual and group interviews began five days after the event.

Data Sources In Crisis Communication: Virginia Tech 

Palen, L., S. Vieweg, J. Sutton, S.B. Liu & A. Hughes (2007). Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World. Third International Conference on e-Social Science, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 7-9, 2007.

Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World

Online Data Sources

Online data was archived and sorted so as not to lose it.
Timelines were created in order to have a visual representation of the data.
A physical map of the information networks was also created

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