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Every library keeps things—archiving is what we do. Books, stories, memories, echoes. But libraries also keep the ghosts that haunt us, hosting them rather than banishing them. They live in the worn carpet and the shifting shelves, in the systems built by those who came before and the habits that refuse to fade. They remind us that every library is a record of coexistence, where past and present selves live side by side. The reader I once was shares space with the librarian I’ve become, the student I helped years ago brushes shoulders with the one I’ll meet tomorrow.
This is the quiet philosophy of librarianship: tending the threshold between what was and what will be. The work isn’t about preservation alone or constant reinvention, but the art of inheritance—keeping what still hums with life while making room for what’s next. The library doesn’t try to chase its ghosts away. It keeps the lights on for them, lets them breathe between the stacks, and trusts that in their company, the living will always find their way.
The invisible work that keeps the library going is one of its biggest hauntings. When you walk into a beautifully curated library, it didn’t happen by accident. New books don’t magically appear on the shelves. They rarely come to us “library ready.” Instead, they need to be processed, barcoded, and covered for protection. From reshelving to managing interlibrary loans and holds, maintaining the collection’s current and orderly status requires a significant amount of labor. In my library, specifically, keeping the genrefication system so that it’s easier for students to browse and find new books takes hours. Many of the materials available in my library exist only because of grants I’ve written for new STEM activities or DonorsChoose projects that I’ve worked hard to secure funding for.
The invisible labor extends to librarians taking on work that isn’t in our job descriptions. I didn’t know that graphic design would become such a big part of my role, but I’m constantly making flyers for programs, content for social media, and posters for displays. I didn’t realize how much of my job would involve marketing—continually trying to convince people to visit, use our space and resources, attend programs, and check out books. Another role I didn’t expect to consume such a large part of my day is being a printer technician. The printers are constantly jamming, disconnecting, or formatting incorrectly. Students come to the library frazzled and panicked before class, desperate to print their assignments just before the deadline.
Outside the library, I spend my own time pre-reading books I want to add to the catalog and keeping up with book club picks. I research other libraries’ social media posts, crafts, and programs to bring new ideas into my own space. The notes app on my phone is full of lists and ideas. I attend literacy nights and author events at other schools and libraries to learn how to enrich my own. I also write about libraries and do advocacy work to preserve them and protect intellectual freedom.
Emotional labor also plays a significant role. My library prides itself on being a safe space for students who are overwhelmed, overstimulated, or outcast. We are a calm place for students to escape the noisy cafeteria during lunch, skip pep rallies, and regulate their nervous systems. I answer the same question from different students over and over—patiently and pleasantly. I remember hundreds of names. I notice who is struggling, who is missing, and who needs extra help.
Information doesn’t die; it lingers. It clings to shelves in obsolete encyclopedias and half-erased call numbers, drifts through the internet as broken links and cached lies. In a school library, you can feel it humming beneath the surface—old systems that refuse to rest, databases that still speak in Dewey’s narrow dialect, search results built on invisible bias. The collection itself is part graveyard, part resurrection site: a place where you hold a book from 2002 about dating in your hands and wonder how many students still believe the myths printed inside. Every weeding session feels like a small burial, a librarian’s version of grief work—thanking a book for what it once meant before making space for what comes next.
And yet, librarians are never just undertakers. We’re digital necromancers, coaxing the undead data of the past into new life. We retrieve information from archives, teach students how to distinguish between the living and the spectral, and perform quiet rituals of repair on broken catalog entries and corrupted files. We unearth forgotten sources, purge misinformation that won’t stay buried, and translate across generations of technology like mediums at a séance. The work isn’t glamorous, but it’s sacred: tending to the restless dead of knowledge so the living can keep learning.
Libraries are living organisms, haunted by past versions of themselves and the folks who have visited. The Nikki who started working at the library years ago is not the same Nikki working there today. That’s a good thing. The child version of a patron follows that adult through the doors when they visit, giving them the same warm fuzzies that first brought them there. Every person who walks in carries a little echo of who they were the first time they felt at home among the shelves. The air itself feels charged with those overlapping versions of everyone. Their curiosity and wonder still hums quietly between the stacks, reminding us that change doesn’t erase what came before; it layers it.
The ghosts of physical change can also be seen all over libraries. The outline of a sign that’s come down, layers and layers of paint, remnants of tape on the walls holding old program flyers. After rearranging the library for genrefication, students returned to look for new books in the old sections. Graphic novels don’t exist in that corner anymore because they outgrew those shelves and needed more space.
Ghosts of pedagogy haunt my library. New educational initiatives arrive one school year to be replaced by a new verbiage of the same idea the next. I switch out school slogans and mission statements, but the ghosts linger—the same aspirations dressed in different buzzwords. Today’s “student-centered learning” is yesterday’s “differentiation,” is tomorrow’s “personalized pathways.” The posters change, but the spirit underneath remains: a restless desire to reinvent education without ever admitting it’s been here before, pacing the halls in new shoes.
The ghosts of neutrality still drift through the library, whispering that a good librarian stays quiet, objective, invisible. For years, that myth passed as professionalism—keep politics out of books, keep feelings out of policy, keep yourself out of view. But neutrality was never neutral; it just protected the status quo. It meant that certain stories stayed shelved, and certain students remained unseen. Those ghosts linger in collection decisions, in displays we second-guess, in the fear that one wrong book might draw fire. Every day they are exorcized. It’s not by pretending they’re gone, but by naming them, by curating loudly and loving your readers in the open. Neutrality does not create safety. It simply hides those who already feel unsafe and calls their silence peace.
Belonging in a library is rarely loud. It shows up in the kid who drifts in during lunch to exist somewhere quiet, or the teacher who lingers after school because the light feels kind. These moments accumulate, layer upon layer, until the air itself feels familiar—like the room knows everyone who’s ever needed it. The ghosts of belonging live in the worn beanbag chair, the inside jokes on sticky notes, the half-finished puzzles left out for “next time.” Every object holds evidence of someone feeling, even briefly, that they were allowed to occupy this space.
The library remembers them all—the freshman who hid behind manga and grew into the senior leading the book club. The teacher who left for another job but still emails for reading recs. Even the students who never returned their books left their mark—creased pages, doodles, forgotten bookmarks, tiny signatures of existence. These ghosts aren’t melancholy; they’re the architecture of the place. Each person who has ever felt safe here leaves behind a trace of that safety for the next to find. The library hums with those echoes, an unspoken chorus saying, You belong, too.
And maybe that’s what keeps you here, year after year—the understanding that a library’s purpose isn’t to preserve silence or order, but to keep welcoming ghosts. Every student who walks in carries every version of themselves: the child who loved One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, the teen who thought they hated reading, the adult who comes back to visit. They coexist, all of them, within these walls. The ghosts of belonging don’t haunt the library; they inhabit it, proof that the door has always been open.
The library will always be full of ghosts—of labor, of information, of change—but they aren’t here to haunt us. They’re here to hold the door. Every echo of laughter, every worn book spine, every trace of someone who felt safe here becomes a quiet welcome for whoever comes next. The ghosts of welcome remind you that this work, as exhausting and invisible as it can be, is really about belonging.
We keep the lights on not just for the living, but for everyone who’s ever needed a place to return to. The ghosts aren’t something to banish; they’re the proof that the library remembers.
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