Today your trusty Blogmeister has a gift for you. Short and sweet blog entry but hours of fun for you elsewhere!

If you’re not too deep into the realm of nerd/geek, you may not know about what a “wiki” is. Sure, you’ve probably seen Wikipedia but that’s only one little corner of a larger collaborative effort with individual wikis defined as “websites that allow collaborative editing of their content and structure by their users”. There seems to be a wiki for everything. A couple you might find surprising:

Search for anything followed by “wiki” in the search and you’ll be amazed at what people are interested in. The web has EVERYTHING in it and somebody who is interested in anything and everything under the sun. I have an old friend who bought a lawn mower business that had been around for years and had accumulated boxes and boxes of stuff that had been forgotten. In the winter he made some side money putting things up on eBay. After all, there’s at least one person in the world who needs a gas cap for a 1963 Bolens tractor.

So back to your gift, the Choral Public Domain Library: http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Over 22,000 (yeah, that’s not a misprint) scores available to download, print and sing. Categorized by genre and composer with a great search engine, it’s just massive. Cruise for a song and click the little pdf logo and you’re off to the races. A couple nuggets to get you started:

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/images/6/62/Wilburn-Danny_Boy.pdf, a version of “Danny Boy” simplified for soprano and baritone.

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/images/5/54/Big_Soggy_Diaper.pdf, a truly bizarre and challenging barbershop quartet piece.

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Amazing_grace_(Traditional), there are no less than 8 versions of “Amazing Grace” (so far).

http://www.adrianoseccomusic.it/arrang/deep.pdf, a beautiful version of “Deep River”, a song we’re quite familiar with.

Explore and enjoy!