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.

Over the past few weeks there has been a sudden increase in the amount of financial data on scholarly communications in the public domain. This was triggered in large part by the Wellcome Trust releasing data on the prices paid for Article Processing Charges by the institutions it funds.

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.

So Google has abandoned Wave. Not really that surprising but obviously dissappointing to those of us who were excited about its potential. Here I argue that part of the problem is that most of us are still restricted in our thinking to static documents on the web. Wave was always about a next generation kind of document that was active and dynamic and that might have contributed to some of the confusion around what it was good for.

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.