I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

• Has anyone seen them for sale?
• Made their own?
• Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
• Used a third-party company to design and print something?

In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

• The School of Athens by Raphael
• The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Other thoughts? suggestions?

Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

Are we training thinkers or doers?

I wrote some thoughts on this here: Without anyone's permission: The open web and online learning.

Nagaraj, A., Shears, E., & Vaan, M. de. (2020). Improving data access democratizes and diversifies science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(38), 23490–23498. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2001682117

One might think that those other languages are well-represented. People connected with the Open Knowledge Foundation are currently tackling this very issue. Here, Open Education isn’t just about content.

That’s something we’ve been doing, yes.

Among the most useful summaries I have found for Linked Data, generally, and in relationship to libraries, specifically. After first reading it, got to hear of the acronym LODLAM: “Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums”. Been finding uses for this tag, in no small part because it gets people to think about the connections between diverse knowledge-focused institutions, places where knowledge is constructed. Somewhat surprised academia, universities, colleges, institutes, or educational organisations like schools aren’t explicitly tied to those others. In fact, it’s quite remarkable that education tends to drive much development in #OpenData, as opposed to municipal or federal governments, for instance. But it’s still very interesting to think about Libraries and Museums as moving from a focus on (a Web of) documents to a focus on (a Web of) data.

The “Open World Assumption” is central to this post and to the actual shift in paradigm when it comes to moving from documents to data. People/institutions have an alleged interest in protecting the way their assets are described. Even libraries. The Open World Assumption makes it sound quite chaotic, to some ears. And claims that machine learning will solve everything tend not to help the unconvinced too much. Something to note is that this ability to say something about a third party’s resource connects really well with Web annotations (which do more than “add metadata” to those resources) and with the fact that no-cost access to some item of content isn’t the end of the openness.