Alumna brought the power of preservation to the state

Alumna brought the power of preservation to the state

Carol Roberts preserved documents and artifacts owned by Tennessee's greatest names in history for 30 years.

By Janel Shoun-Smith | 08/12/2026

Like so many others before her, Carol Ann Roberts (BA '81) began her college career expecting to go into the medical field. And also like so many others before her, she discovered a new path that suited her much better: history.

After earning a master's degree in historic conservation, Roberts drew on her early chemistry courses to help her land a job at the Tennessee State Library and Archives as an archival conservator, which often involves ferreting out why deterioration is occurring and stopping it in its tracks.

Instead of caring for patients, Roberts spent 33 years caring for documents, photos, artifacts and scholars.

"I knew how to use the chemical technology, and I could look at what was causing the problem," she said. "Say, if it was insects or mold, or other factors, I would determine if they were harmful to the documents and the researcher (in the case of allergies). My biology background was able to help me isolate the problem, and it was a tremendous benefit to my career in restoration."

Semi-retired as of 2020, Roberts is now the part-time county archivist back in her hometown of Shelbyville, going to work at the courthouse on the historic town square that has served her family well over seven generations.

When she was growing up, Roberts' father, Winston, ran the family farm in Bedford County. Her mother Rachel Alexander Roberts (A '44) worked in Lipscomb's registrar's office for a time in the 1950s. All of Rachel's brothers and sisters attended Lipscomb as well, said Carol.

After graduating from Lipscomb herself, Roberts taught history for a couple of years, but felt she would have better job prospects with a master's degree so she went to Middle Tennessee State University to get a master's degree in historic preservation, focusing on museum and archival preservation. After earning her degree, she worked for two years at the Davidson County Metro Historical Commission, before joining the state archives in 1986.

At the time, Roberts was only the second conservator to have worked at the state archives, the first having been there nearly 30 years from the time the first conservation lab was built, she said.

Roberts did physical restorations on items like books, documents and photographs, working to preserve them and stabilize them so they could be made available for use by the public. "You have to know the era and the history of the paper to know how to preserve it," noted Roberts.

Acid-free envelopes and storage containers are crucial to document preservation. Transparent adhesive tape, or any display method that is permanent, is never to be used. Later in her career, knowledge of digital storage and backups became required.

The state archives' primary responsibility, by law, is to preserve the records of state government, said Roberts. When Tennessee became a state in 1796, it was required to keep records of land transactions, and today historians can still see the deeds, folded up pieces of paper, back to the 1790s. Scholars can see land transactions records with the signatures of all the heavy-hitter families of Tennessee's early days: Overton, Jackson and Crockett, to name just a few, Roberts said.

But the institution also holds what historians call "manuscripts," a collection of donated documents and/or items all related to one family or topic. One of Roberts' favorite manuscripts to study is the one for Tolbert Fanning, a leader in the American Restoration Movement and the namesake of Lipscomb's Fanning Residence Hall, along with his wife Charlotte.

Being from a farming background, Roberts loves the history of agricultural changes and advancements, and Fanning fits the bill as he ran two farms, bred horses, trained young ministers to be successful farmers, ran a newspaper called The Agriculturist and published another called The Naturalist. His name comes up often in the archives' land records, said Roberts.

Even in retirement, Roberts is lending her skills to preserve history in her hometown. She is working to get a more usable, publicly accessible Bedford County archive "off the ground," she said. Public access is important as people need county records for many uses, from obtaining a REAL ID or certifying a marriage to working through complicated estates or confirming land ownership, she said.

"Just about any topic in Tennessee history, you can go to the state archives or your local county archives and look for that subject in their manuscripts," she said. "We put together all the clues from the various documents (such as store ledgers, marriage licenses or letters) and make conclusions. It's putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

"It is a more unusual job," she said. "I feel very blessed to have gotten the opportunity to do something I really love to do."