After graduating from grammar school, Katrin Stroth completed an industrial management assistant apprenticeship at Benteler AG in Paderborn, where she worked in quality assurance before taking up a course of studies in public library management at the College of Librarianship and Documentation (FHBD) in Cologne.

She completed an additional course in music librarianship in Stuttgart. After that, she worked as a librarian at the Cologne Public Library. There she was mainly involved in the fields of music, exhibition work and Internet training. In 1999, she became deputy director of the media library in Cologne. In September 2000, she transferred to the Paderborn City Library, where she took over the management of the library system. As Paderborn is a centre of technology, the focus of her work is on expanding innovative, technical and digital library services.

In addition to her diploma thesis on film sequences cataloguing, she has published several articles in professional journals.