KNOXVILLE — The Thompson Brothers Digital Photograph Collection, an online collection of breathtaking images of the Great Smoky Mountains, is now available through the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, libraries at http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/thompson.

The collection is part of a partnership between the UT Libraries Digital Library Initiatives department and the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project. It features two photograph albums with a single image collection to follow.

Robin and Jim Thompson were prominent Knoxville-based photographers from the 1920s to the 1940s. Their photos of the Smoky Mountains were used in reports to the federal government encouraging the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Many of the photos were taken by Jim Thompson, an avid hiker and founding member of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club.

The Thompson Brothers Digital Photograph Collection began as a project between the UT Libraries and the Calvin McClung Collection of the Knox County Public Library to convert the McClung Thompson photograph collection and a UT Special Collections album into digital images.

The project expanded when curators from Harvard University and Colorado College offered to loan two more Thompson photo albums to UT to be converted to digital images. The albums contain unique images of the Smoky Mountains that were not available in the McClung and UT Collections.

For more information, please contact the Digital Library Initiatives at http://www.lib.utk.edu/dlc or the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project at http://www.lib.utk.edu/smokies.

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Contacts:

Hannah Barker, John Hodges Library, (865) 974-4725, hbarker1@utk.edu

Amy Blakely, UT media relations, (865) 974-5034, amy.blakely@tennessee.edu

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