Clarita S. Anderson was the Curator of the Costume and Textile Collection for the Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics at the University of Maryland. Anderson’s education started with a B.S. in textile from the University of Minnesota and a Masters in Social and Economic aspects of Clothing with a duel enrolment from 1955-1959. In her doctoral program at the University of Maryland, she became interested in nineteenth century American flat textiles, in particular coverlets. Anderson liked this coverlets for their beauty and utilitarian functions. Anderson would go on to write her dissertation on, Maryland Coverlets: The Artifacts, Technology, and Weavers.

After graduating for the University of Maryland in 1985 she established the Maryland Historical Textile Database in 1986. In order to create the database, she along with Catherine Kay Hawthorne contacted state and local museums, historical societies, and private collectors whom agreed to help with the creation of a coverlet database. In 1990, she received a copyright for the database, which was a logical extension of Anderson’s dissertation. Today the database has over 14,000 entries. Anderson would go on to teach about textiles at the University of Maryland and write three books, Weaving a Legacy: The Don and Jean Stuck coverlet collection (1995). FIGURED and FANCY "Weavers of Wayne County, New York" (1996), American Coverlets and their Weavers: Coverlets from the Collection of Foster and Muriel McCarl (2002).