What is a library?

The Arts Council of England have recently published a report on the health and wellbeing benefits of public libraries. It concluded that libraries play an important role in the hard-to-measure aspects of a community's wellbeing, beyond the crucial services that they offer in book lending, meeting spaces, education, children's activities and so on. My childhood would have been considerably the poorer without our local library.

The report has been more broadly on my mind, however, as I've visited two rather special libraries in the United States, a far remove in many ways from Britain's benighted regional local libraries. The first was the Medical Library at Yale, partly founded by, and half named after, Harvey Cushing. Cushing was a pioneering neuroscientist, who left Yale not only his important rare book collection, determined that the medical faculty should have its own high-class library, but also his collection of diseased brains in 1939. For many years these mouldered, unloved, in a basement storage space at Yale, creating a ghoulish rite of passage for medical students who broke into the storeroom to sign their names on a growing register of the 'Brain Society': 'Leave only your name. Take only memories'. Since 2010, however, Cushing's 'tumor registry' has been housed in a wood-lined glowing museum in the basement of the library, combined with archives and artefacts from his life and studies. Although it took some perseverance to gain entry, a visit to the collection, reached down a flight of stairs through the main stacks is a timely reminder that libraries are not just repositories for books.

Two days later, I visited the Boston Public Library, an enormous monument to public resources and learning, founded in 1848 and housed in a neo-Renaisance edifice built from 1888. It too has some weird and wonderful collections. Off the (inexplicably empty) print room I found a charming room displaying a set of twelve dioramas showing artists at work, from Rembrandt to Rowlandson to Muirhead Bone, riffing off their well-known images. Down a corridor that held two antique printing presses, I found a marionette collection in a glazed but tantalisingly locked room. The McKim building is also home to an extraordinary series of interiors. The main staircase features a mural cycle on the Muses by French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes; what was the book collection room houses a richly coloured series treating 'The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail' by the Philadelphian Edwin Austin Abbey; and of course, Abbey's studio-mate in London, famous Bostonian portraitist John Singer Sargent filled a gallery on the third floor with 'The Triumph of Religion'. These are soaring and densely detailed, spaces to enliven the soul and distract from the reading of books. Likewise, the building revolves around a central Renaissance-style courtyard with shaded colonnades and a tinkling fountain.

Both libraries and collections were beautiful and rewarding experiences to visit, filled with people working, resting, socialising, disputing, learning, gazing, and even eating and drinking (in designated areas). They reminded me what rich places libraries are for communities, big and small, and how much more they are than an - undeniably important - collection of books.