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CHAPTER ONE Relationships Are the New Reference Collection Public libraries are connectors in the community. What if what a patron needs is a connection to the community organization or anything else the commu- nity has to provide? We can be the expert in that too. And that’s a hundred percent our role just as much as finding physical or digital materials for some- one. —Bella, homelessness and poverty librarian Overview One of the first questions we hear from both librarians and social workers when we introduce them to the concept of WPL is: Are you trying to turn librarians into social workers? The answer is an emphatic no! As we estab- lished in the introduction, librarians and social workers have highly comple- mentary, but distinct, approaches to patron/client services. Librarians call on social workers to fill a gap they feel acutely in the needs of patrons, but the role of librarians in meeting those needs remains information-based. In the introduction, we covered the shared foundations of librarianship and social work. In this chapter, we shift into a contemporary, practical per- spective to ask: What role do social workers and social service agencies play in communities? Where does the library fit into those roles? How can library staff turn understanding into connections with community partners? This chapter has two goals: first, to inform library staff who aren’t familiar with social work about the basics of what social workers do and second, to provide context and confidence for library staff to create their own “relationship-based reference collection” of social services in their community.