Imagine going to an enormous museum - the biggest in the world.

It has a huge queue of excited visitors along the street in front of it, many steps up to its imposingGrand and impressive-looking. door and, once you get inside, absolutely nothing!

Nothing to see, that is. Open your nostrils and it is a different story.

Moving through the galleries, you travel through time - from the smell of a feast in Ancient Rome to a 21st-Century brunch in New York, on to the pong of a VictorianThe era when Queen Victoria was on the British throne, from 1837 to 1901.  street, to the stink of a World War One trench.

This museum does not yet exist - but could it?

Researcher Cecilia Bembibre believes that historians have ignored smells for too long. They are an essential part of humanity's cultural heritageValued things from the past., she argues: part of what makes places and times unique.

Using cutting-edge techniques, she captures the scent of historic objects, such as ancient moulds and old books in the library of St Paul's CathedralOne of London's most famous landmarks, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. This working church was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1967.. She then works out the different chemicals that go into making that scent in order to write a 'recipe' for reproducing it.

In the future, this could be used to create a museum of smells that might otherwise be in danger of disappearing forever.

There may not be long to wait. Already Odeuropa, a European research project, is undertaking a £2.8m three year plan to create the first major museum. 

The team is using AIA computer programme that has been designed to think.  to trawl through 250,000 historical documents in seven different languages. Then, they will use the information to create the online Encyclopaedia of Smell Heritage. 

But the group is involved in some real-life pongs too. This April, a collaboration with Museum Ulm in Germany opened to visitors. A new guided tour, dubbed Follow Your Nose, paired scents with artworks that have visual references to smells. 

Martin Schaffner's 1549 painting Christ in Limbo was accompanied by "the harrowing atmosphere of Hell", described as a "smoky" and "rotten" scent. His earlier work, Portrait of Eisel Besserer, had the altogether nicer smell of pomanderA piece of fragranced jewellery, including nutmeg, cinnamon and rose. They were used to protect the body during plague outbreaks. . 

But would a museum of smells really be worth it?

Smell is the most powerful of all our five senses. The human nose can recognise one trillion different odours, most of which we don't even have words to describe.

Unsurprisingly, then, smell has had a huge impact on culture. The UnescoThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Part of the UN, it seeks to build peace through international cooperation in education, the sciences and culture.  list of intangible cultural heritage already includes activities that relate to smell, such as perfume-making in southern France, and festivals in Spain and Columbia. Now, some think it should contain the smells themselves. 

Smells may also help us, more than anything else, connect with other humans - both dead and alive. The novelist Marcel ProustA French novelist who lived from 1871 to 1922.  wrote about how "taste and smell alone" remain when all other memories fail.

Yet because smells leave no trace, they are easily overlooked. Unlike more traditional museum objects - things we can touch - we cannot just discover old smells lying around.

To be remembered, the smells of the past need to be experienced directly. They might just be reaching your nose sooner than you think. 

Yes: A museum of smells could transform our understanding of both the past and present. Our environment is changing rapidly. We need to preserve the smells around us before they disappear forever.

No: This is a silly idea. Smells are ephemeralLasting for a very short time. - they are made to disappear and we should not try to keep them. To learn from the past, we need sight and touch to read old documents and study objects. 

Or... A real-life museum may be a good idea, but an online encyclopaedia certainly is not. Smells must be experienced to be understood - that cannot happen in the odourless virtual world.