Merely by its nature, Collecteurs has an obvious limitation: The art can only be seen online. “Not everybody has the resources to open a private museum,” Mr. Oralkan said. “So people are looking for alternative options, and those are most likely going to be digital.”

Collecteurs is trying to be at once a management software; a social media platform; an online magazine with plans for print books down the road; and, more nebulously, an online museum for the public. Its founders say that the platform isn’t geared toward buying and selling, but rather it’s another way of getting access to information about where art is.

The concept of a “digital museum” isn’t really new. Many museums have long been digitizing their collections so that anyone with an internet connection can scroll through images of the art. But when does something grow from a collection of images online to an online museum, and does Collecteurs qualify?

“This is really not a museum by any stretch of the definition,” said Claire Bishop, a professor of art history at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who has researched and written about the effects of digital technology on visual art. She said the lack of emphasis on research, the shortage of contextual information about objects and the absence of extensive curation make Collecteurs more social network than museum. The information on the website is self-reported, so it can be as robust or as limited as a collector chooses; often, collectors include dimensions, medium, artist, materials and exhibition history. Sometimes, they add notes and can curate digital exhibitions of their works.

“If the minimum definition of a digital museum is a collection of jpegs online, then an online archive like Artstor is the greatest digital museum on earth,” Ms. Bishop said, referring to a nonprofit digital image library that has amassed millions of images for scholarly use. The use of the word “museum,” she said, is a misnomer, and lends the project cachet while misrepresenting its aims.