Celebrating Nontraditional Museums on the Web

 Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Readerville creator Karen Templer.

One of my central preoccupations these days is the act of curation, and its increasing significance in our everyday world. Which means also thinking about curation's fraternal-twin concept, the museum. Our collective rush to document our lives and world (in words, pictures, and video) has prompted and necessitated a simultaneous rise in the curation impulse, so has the world begun to redefine the museum. Here's a shortlist of some of my favorite nontraditional museum-related web offerings.

A Loft Filled with Dirt and the Man Who's Cared for it for 19 Years: The New York Earth Room is basically a museum with a single exhibit: a room full of dirt. Photography of any kind is not allowed, so this short video focuses instead on Bill Dilworth, the guy who's been tending the dirt and tracking the visitors—in a surprisingly interesting way—for the past 19 years. (The Earth Room has been there since 1977.)

The Museum of Whatnot: I love this short story by Kevin Wilson, and imagine Bill Dilworth would too: "I am thirty-one years old. I have a degree in museum science from Dartmouth. I keep to myself. I am the caretaker and sole employee of the Carl Jensen Museum of Whatnot. We, and by we, I mean me, call it the MOW. We sell T-shirts but no one's buying. The MOW is the only museum in the world dedicated solely to the acquisition and preservation of the everyday made unique. Things that are ordinarily junk but not junk because someone, somewhere, made it more than that by their collecting, hoarding, and preserving it. ..."

Europeana: Still in the formative stages, Europeana is a joint effort between the major museums and libraries of Europe—including the likes of the Rijksmuseum, the British Library and the Louvre. They're literally all uploading their collections into a single massive, multimedia exhibition. For example, the Darwin collection comprises 11,000 texts; 67,869 images; 803 videos; 42 sounds.

Tomorrow Museum: Joanne McNeil's blog is hard to define. Even her own summary doesn't quite get at the heart of it: "The Tomorrow Museum is a collection of images and speculative essays exploring how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts."

Museum of Online Museums: Among the many great things on offer from the master curators at Coudal Partners is this collection—they call it the Museum of Online Museums—of links to the best exhibitions online, encompassing everything from Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art to Van Gogh's Letters to The Grocery List Collection. It even keeps track of which ones you've visited.

Bio: Karen Templer is a writer, editor, web developer, and the creator of Readerville.com (may it rest in peace). Follow @karentempler on Twitter.