The Ruth Cates Baird papers consist of the personal and professional materials and papers that Baird collected over her lifetime. The bulk of the collection consists of photographs and scrapbooks collected by Baird. Some of the scrapbooks contain greeting cards and other keepsakes that she kept from her students and friends, magazine clippings, and poetry clipped from newspapers. The other scrapbooks contain maps, brochures, guides, photographs, collectibles, and other ephemera from the trips that she took both within the U. S. and internationally.

The collection also contains Baird's personal journals and day planners, in which she recorded her daily activities from 1931 until 2006. The collection contains a small amount of correspondence between Baird and her mother, the funeral guestbooks from her parents' funerals, and some church-related materials. It also houses her school records from primary school through college as well as several teaching awards from her time as an Oak Ridge school teacher.