Playing with the my "material examined" tool I've been working on, I wondered whether I could make use of it in, say, a spreadsheet. Imagine that I have a spreadsheet of museum codes and want to look those up in GBIF. I could create a service for Open Refine but Open Refine is a bit big and clunky, you have to fire up a Java application and point your browser at it, and Open Refine isn't as intuitive or as flexible as a spreadsheet.

The bulk of the Biodiversity Heritage Library's content is available as DjVu files, which package together scanned page images and OCR text. Websites such as BHL or my own BioStor display page images, but there's no way to interact with the page content itself.

One thing I find myself doing a lot is creating Excel spreadsheets and filling them will lists of taxonomic names and bibliographic references, for which I then try to extract identifiers (such as DOIs). This is a tedious business, but the hope is that by doing it once I can create a useful resource. However, often I get bored and the spreadsheets lie forgotten in some deep recess of my computer's hard drive.