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I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Last week I sent this message to the "Suggestions and Ideas" forum at delicious. http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237&page=1#Item_0 The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a network of faculty members. Then have one login whose network included those users, and share that login so that lots of people could share that network. Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks, but that doesn't scale up very well. Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching: I started with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.html<http://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html>. I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title. Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web, collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems might arise there). But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into a lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists. Now, you could rely on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of sites/cites. But I thought you might want to differentiate between the source - .edus, librarys, etc. So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian Colgate University Libraries [log in to unmask] 315-228-7363