Anywhere Adventures

Local adventures inspired by history from Innovator in Residence Vivian Li

About the Work

The Library of Congress appointed Seattle-based artist and developer Vivian Li as the Innovator in Residence in 2025 and 2026. With her project “Anywhere Adventures” Li created a mobile website experience for audiences around the country to learn about their hometowns through items from the Library’s digital collections. Prior to her residency, Li developed a popular social media series about the Seattle Fremont Bridge in 2023, finding others who shared her enthusiasm for entertaining and informative stories about local history. As Library of Congress Innovator in Residence, she worked with Library staff to highlight unique, amusing and awe-inspiring collection items that enable young people to discover the Library’s vast online resources about their own communities. In addition to Li’s hometown of Seattle, Washington, Anywhere Adventures expanded to spotlight Chicago, Illinois and Southeastern Wyoming, locations nominated by Americans as part of a crowdsourced outreach campaign in early 2025. The project's website provides self-guided tours and activities for each location, all culminating in a personalized zine, or digital scrapbook, to share with others..

Create Your Own Research Adventure (CYORA) Zines

As part of her residency, Vivian created a series of research guides in the format of zines, homemade magazines dedicated to a particular topic or interest. The Create Your Own Research Adventure (CYORA) zines serve as a starter guide to navigating the Library’s vast online collections. Read on to learn more about each zine, print out your own copy and get instructions on how to assemble your zine!

• CYORA Issue 01 Maps: This zine focuses on the Library’s Sanborn Maps collection, a searchable database of fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company and housed in the Library’s Geography and Map Division.
• CYORA Issue 02 HABS/HAER/HALS: This zine covers the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). Housed within the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, these collections document achievements in architecture, engineering and landscape design in the United States and its territories.
• CYORA Issue 03 Carol Highsmith: This zine highlights the Carol Highsmith Archive, which contains more than 70,000 photos documenting the United States. The collection, housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, spans from 1980 to the present and includes landmark buildings, architectural renovation projects, landscapes and cityscapes, and people and cultural events.
• CYORA Issue 04 Newspapers: This zine features the historic American newspaper collection, Chronicling America. The collection provides access to select digitized newspaper pages and contains millions of newspaper pages from nearly every state and territory in the United States published through 1963.
• CYORA Issue 05 Occupational Folklife: This zine focuses on the Occupational Folklife Project, which is housed in the Library’s American Folklife Center. The project, started in 2010, is a multi-year effort to document the culture of contemporary American workers. To date, fieldworkers across the United States have recorded more than 1800 audio and audiovisual oral history interviews with workers in scores of trades, industries, crafts, and professions.

Zine Folding Instructions

The Create Your Own Research Adventure zines are designed to be printed on an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of printer paper and don’t require any staples or binding! See below for illustrated and written instructions by Vivian. You’ll need your printed zine and a pair of scissors.

Instructions

1. Fold a sheet of paper in half, lengthwise.
2. Open the sheet of paper.
3. Fold the same sheet of paper in half, widthwise.
4. Open the sheet of paper. Your sheet should have a vertical and horizontal crease at the center.
5. Fold the right side of the sheet and align the right edge with the vertical crease in the middle of the sheet of paper.
6. Open the sheet of paper.
7. Fold the left side of the sheet of paper and align the left edge with the vertical crease in the middle of the sheet of paper.
8. Open the sheet of paper. You should now have one horizontal crease, and three vertical creases on the sheet of paper.
9. Fold the sheet of paper in half, widthwise.
10. Take your scissors and make two separate cuts. The first cut is along the horizontal crease from the right edge of the folded sheet. Make sure you DO NOT cut past the vertical crease in the center. The second cut is along the horizontal crease from the left edge of the folded sheet.
11. Open the sheet of paper. There should be an opening in the center of the sheet from where you made your cuts and two slits at the left and right of the opening.
12. Fold your sheet in half, lengthwise. The opening in the middle of the sheet will flare. Push both sides of the paper together so they meet in the middle. The sheet will now look like a plus sign.
13. Fold the sheets onto each other by bending at the creases.

Publications

• Should Anywhere Adventures Come to Your Town?
• Announcing Anywhere Adventures Locations
• Innovator in Residence, Vivian Li, Visits the Library

About Vivian

Vivian Li is an illustrator, comics artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois. She previously served as an Artist in Residence creating digital data visualizations for two historic Seattle bridges in a partnership between the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and Seattle Department of Transportation. She published the first volume of her comic cookbook on homemade Chinese cuisine, ABC Cooking, in 2023. Li has contributed comics to Papeachu Review, Fogland Press and Portland Zine Symposium.

Contact

For more information or questions about this project, email LC-Labs@loc.gov, subscribe to The Signal blog, and follow Vivian on Instagram @vivianlikesfruit External.