Occasionally you have an “aha!” moment when you come across an application that goes beyond the expected. I had one recently when I discovered what the folks at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are doing. “Wow! What a good idea!” I thought to myself as I browsed their site at www.recaptcha.net.

Now, everyone has come across CAPTCHA text boxes — the little colorful and sometimes distorted-beyond-belief images you must decipher before you submit a registration form on the Internet. They prevent spam “bots” from hammering your website with a constant barrage of automated spam content. They’re all over the place and, to be frank, most of us hate the inconvenience of proving we’re human.

Maybe you’ll feel differently when you understand what CMU is doing with CAPTCHA.
I certainly did.

They’ve gone beyond the normal, creating a reCAPTCHA service with a unique spin: It stops spam and at the same time gets you involved in the monumental task of digitizing books for the Internet Archive!

Aha!

I told you it was such a moment.

Here’s a quote from the reCAPTCHA website that helps to put it in perspective:

“Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.”

In other words – as you solve the CAPTCHA challenge – you’re empowering the digitization of older books – in a way scanning software cannot (so, we can still beat them at something!).

Now, that’s different. Truly unique.

Suddenly we rise above the irritation of having to solve picture puzzles to prove to a website that we are not spam bots out to rip off personal information. The nuisance of taking an extra second or two to type in a meaningless phrase unexpectedly soars to noble heights. It’s no longer a mindless task! It’s participation in a higher goal.

We’ve become part of a great (admittedly unconscious) fellowship of archival assistants!

This is innovative thinking at a high level. Solving an unsolvable puzzle – by connecting two seemingly unrelated objectives (security – archiving) – into a new and mutually beneficial result.