This post is the third in a series about the Library’s 2025 Innovator in Residence, Vivian Li, and her project Anywhere Adventures. Following the selection of three communities, and a visit to the Library for research, the mobile experience has now officially launched!
The 2025 Innovator in Residence project, Anywhere Adventures, has officially launched!
The brainchild of comics artist and web developer Vivian Li, Anywhere Adventures invites the public to engage with the histories of three locations: Li’s home of Seattle, Washington, and two other communities selected through a crowdsourcing campaign earlier this year, Southeastern Wyoming and Chicago, Illinois.
Starting December 11th, visitors to the mobile experience will be able to explore three American communities through items from the Library’s digital collections and learn about the stories, people, and events that shaped everyday life in these places.
You can learn more about the creation of the mobile website through this video.
Now that all three initial locations are live, we’re deciding where to bring Anywhere Adventures next in 2026! If you’d like to nominate your hometown, be sure to comment below. Nominations will be open through January 30, 2026.
The Anywhere Adventures website, designed to be viewed on a phone, offers self-guided tours of locations across each of the selected cities using historical photos, maps, newspaper articles, and other Library materials. The variety of materials pleasantly surprised Li who, at the start of her project, wasn’t sure what kinds of items were available in the Library’s collections.
“The Library of Congress, like most libraries nowadays, has more than just books, which makes research really fun because you can approach it from so many angles,” she said.
“If I was researching the history of a bridge in Seattle, my first instinct might be to see if the library has a photograph of it. But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean it’s a dead end – perhaps the bridge appears on an illustrated map, or someone wrote about it when it was being constructed in the newspaper, or it’s highlighted in a travel book.”
When conducting research in the Library’s digital collections, Li was also surprised by the volume of Library items related to each location, even her own childhood hometown. “I live in Seattle now, which is a place you’d totally expect to find in the Library of Congress, but I grew up in a town in western Illinois called Macomb.”
She continued, “I assumed that the Library of Congress, being the nation’s library, would have nothing to do with a small town like mine. But when I looked Macomb up in the Library’s digital collections, I found that it was the opposite – there were stories about my hometown that I had never heard before. It’s a very exciting feeling – knowing that your town’s history, which might seem inconsequential now, has residence at such a large institution.”
It’s a feeling that Li is hoping resonates with mobile visitors as they click through a location on the Anywhere Adventures map and engage with the collection items. In addition to telling the stories of each community, Li has illustrated the people, events, and places with her vibrant art and comics.
After reading about each location, visitors can also create a zine, or digital scrapbook, of their visit by using the site’s travel log feature. Visitors can decorate each entry with interactive elements like stickers, also designed by Li, and text annotations.
We invite all of you to go exploring, and also to nominate your hometown in the comments below. The two new locations will be announced in February 2026, so be sure to check back to see where Anywhere Adventures is going next!
The Innovator in Residence program invites arts and technology practitioners to conduct research with Library staff and demonstrate new methods of engaging with materials in the Library’s collections. A Broad Agency Announcement for the next Innovator in Residence is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2026, with the Residency beginning later in 2026. Please refer to labs.loc.gov/about/opportunities for more information.
This post has been edited with information about the Innovator in Residence opportunity.
Comments (18)
I nominate Baltimore, MD.
Pascagoula, Mississippi – we are the home of one of our country’s long standing naval shipbuilding companies, we are along the Gulf of America, and we are strategically between multiple ports and bases for our country’s shipping industry and military complex.
Come to Kansas City. Both of them!
New Egypt, NJ
Boise, ID and/or the Treasure Valley area of southwest Idaho!
I nominate Solvay, New York. In the late 1800s, Solvay was the original North American location for Ernest Solvay’s synthetic soda ash production process. Soda ash was used world wide in a variety of products and commercial uses. The geographic area is home to natural salt deposits and the local Lake Onondaga was the water resource necessary for the factory production process. The Erie Canal nearby was essential in delivering these needed chemicals to market.
I nominate Charlottesville VA and the surrounding Albemarle County.
I nominate Providence, RI!
I nominate Camarillo, CA in Ventura County.
Santa Monica, CA
I nominate Edgefield, South Carolina. Beautiful small town with a rich history!
Durham, NC or Asheville, NC!
Pittsburgh, PA!
Canyon City Oregon.
Paterson New Jersey is full of interesting buildings and history
Philadelphia: Birthplace of the country, home of the first library, and a place of civic innovation.
I’d like to nominate Cleveland, Ohio, located on Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes. Cleveland has a fascinating immigrant and industrial history, as well as an especially tricky river, the Cuyahoga, regularly navigated by enormous ore boats to carry goods to and from what was once the industrial heart of the city known as the Flats.
Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, where the Sauk River joins the Mississippi, 60 miles north of the Twin Cities. In 1886, an F4 tornado destroyed the town, killed 72 people, and cast the survivors into a “What If” mindset for the next 140 years. It rebuilt in the shadow of nearby Saint Cloud, and sought to define itself with kindness and sturdiness. Plus, most everyone in Sauk Rapids has the famous Minnesota accent and says things like “you betcha” and “oh, for cute!”