 For all these reasons, the historian David McCullough has described the Boston Public Library as one of the five most important libraries in the United States, the others being the federal Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the university libraries of Harvard and Yale.In the middle of the 19th century, several people helped establish the Boston Public Library.George Ticknor, a Harvard professor and trustee of the Boston Athenaeum, proposed establishing a public library in Boston in 1826, but the idea did not generate enough interest.