Books in del.icio.us (or, égalité, fraternité, library!)

I am intrigued by the idea of using del.icio.us to organize the library's "suggested websites." This is one of those offerings that I think is a hold-over from the pre-LII and pre-IPL online world. It is getting to be a duplication of effort for individual libraries to be in the process of maintaining their own set of "best reference links."

That being said, there is still a place for us to compile websites that will help students with a particular class or assignment. And to be an equal opportunity promoter, we may as well sling some books at them, too. So, the task at hand is to find out how to get a permanent URL to a book record and tag it in del.icio.us with everything else.

To distinguish the books from the websites, we can use the [book] convention utilized by Google Scholar, which I really like. For that matter, we can use the brackets to classify the website content, too: I could see [statistics] or [news] being viable categories.

This allows two things to happen:
1. We can distinguish the format of information in brackets, which will help reinforce the importance of finding the right size "chunk" of information.
2. It gets students back into the catalog.

Two things to look into:
1. Adding permanent URLs to articles that would send students through the proxy server. I don't know if this falls under del.icio.us's desire to help people find resources open to them (they may see it as mal.icio.us), but, it will help the students.
2. Adding permanent URLs to search strings in databases - example searches?
3. Will the URLs into the catalog (we have SIRSI) "expire"?

Time to play this afternoon. Finals week is wonderful project time.