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The crowd was smaller than we expected because of a tornado watch that night. About 20 minutes into the talk, the watch became a warning, and our discussion was interrupted by a cacophony of cell phone warnings for a storm headed our way. We ended the discussion and sent most folks on their way.

The rest of us trudged through the hallways and down into the basement, seeing parts of the library that most people never see.

It was a reminder that libraries, in big cities and small towns, do a heck of a lot more than check out books. It’s the place we take our toddlers for reading hours; it’s where children and teenagers go to study; it’s where many of us vote; it’s where we often go for information on public records.

In my latest tour with Sorth, she told me something else: Libraries are increasingly a place where you can find a social worker helping a family through troubled times.

The county library system in recent years has hired six social workers to move among its 20 branches, and it plans to hire more. It’s one of the reasons the Library Journal recently awarded the St. Louis County system with its , which comes with a $250,000 grant.

Social workers are among the ways the library system connects to the St. Louis community, Sorth says. The library remains a local institution that folks trust to ask questions to, even when they are in a vulnerable situation.

“People have always come to the library to ask questions,” Sorth says. “It’s a place where they feel comfortable.”

Indeed, in an era when many institutions, from public schools to the judiciary, are under political attack, trust in libraries remains high, according to .

In St. Louis County, that trust plays out in different ways than when Sorth first got into the library business. It might mean, for example, an unhoused person coming into a library to get out of the weather, and then getting help with various needs that have nothing to do with reading.

The social workers in libraries served more than 800 people in the first three months of 2025, offering referrals for food and clothing, transportation, medical services, domestic violence assistance and help with rent and utility bills.

Libraries have changed, Sorth said, because the communities they serve demand it.

At the Florissant Valley branch, for instance, one of the more popular innovations is the Once a week, people who have outstanding warrants or other entanglements with the criminal justice system can get help from legal volunteers to clear up the problems, which might otherwise lead to an arrest and jail time.

The tap-in center came out of discussions Sorth had with legal nonprofits after the Ferguson uprising, which brought attention to the number of north St. Louis County residents with outstanding warrants for traffic tickets, exacerbating their poverty and even ending up in jail.

More than 1,600 warrants have been recalled under the four-year-old program, in which volunteer lawyers work with the prosecutor and public defender offices on nonviolent cases, most of them misdemeanors. According to Sorth, about 80 percent of the people who have used the tap-in center to clear up old warrants did not return to jail in the next year.

That success story is just as important as the story of a small businessman who uses the library for conference calls in a private room, or the senior citizen who records his memories in the genealogy center for the next generation, or the teenager who comes in to record a podcast.

“We are a center of community,” Sorth says. “We have space for everybody.”