Today's stamping meeting got me thinking about how we can provide a unified approach to the notion of stamping and of 'linking' items. Here are 3 images of a detail view. The first one is a simple Book detail view that has buttons like the stamping buttons we have today.

Clicking on the 'Event' button changes the detail view to look like this, with additional event-related fields:

At first glance this could seem to the user no different than what the existing stamping buttons do now, but repeated clicking on them shows that it's not just adding fields to the Book item, it's actually creating distinct but related Event, Message, and Note (etc.) items:

Each of these related items could be displayed in the detail view, with the ability to expand or collapse each of them to show more or less detail.