Hello, all.  I am wondering what is a "best practice" way to handle
"one-off" calls to one's database of electronic resources.  That is, we
have our A-Z list of Electronic Resources, coded in the usual fashion,
and then we have our Subject Guide tool, also calling on the same
database, but then there are regular ol' web pages here and there that
point to, say, Academic Search Premier or CQ Researcher.  Rather than
hard-coding the URL as it happens to appear on Jan 28, 2005, I should
like to call up the appropriate record from the db.

In a previous existence, I had a big mess of includes, one encapsulated
db query for each resource I needed to call, but that seems awfully
messy.  I suppose I could have a function that passes the unique id of
the item, and returns the info I need, but this seems like a lot of
discrete db calls, especially if I have one page that references a
number of our resources throughout.

Is there a better way to do this?  (I'm working in a LAMP/WAMP environment.)

Thanks,

Andrew Darby
Web Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
http://www.ithaca.edu/library/