Ruth Ketterer Harris was born Ruth Elizabeth Ketterer in 1910. She received both her Bachelor's in Home Economics and Education (1931) and Master's in Home Economics (1932) degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She taught high school until her marriage to Wilfred Harris, and she served as the assistant curator for the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum from 1943 to 1945. In the 1950s, she taught weaving at the Madison Vocational School and at UW-Madison, where she became a member of the faculty in the School of Home Economics (now the School of Human Ecology). She worked closely with Helen Louise Allen in the development of the textile collection at the university, and began her own tenure in 1968, after Allen's death, as the first curator of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. She retired in 1977 as Curator Emeritus.
Harris kept a personal research library which became the Ruth Ketterer Harris Library donated after her death in 1990 by her husband, to the School of Human Ecology, as a non-circulating reference library which officially opened for the first time in 1992. Later, the collection became more widely available and preserved through the Kohler Art Library and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Special Collections.
NOTE: The UW Archives Biographical Files have one folder for Harris, Ruth, which contains a summary of a scrapbook and several photocopies of documents, correspondence, and articles, mostly relating to Harris' time as the assistant curator of the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum.
