Ears, Nose, Throat, and Museum?

I guess you could say that I'm part of the Google generation. I turn to Google products multiple times every day. I blog on Blogger, which is owned by Google. My primary email is through gmail, I use Google maps to find where I'm going, and I use google search to find the answers to my questions.

Today I was thinking about the furs and hides in our collection. We have a large sheep or goat hide with fur intact and more than one tanned or semi-tanned leather hide. As part of a class project in the Winter quarter we're planning on rolling many of our Navajo rugs and Mexican textiles. At some point it came up that we might roll the fur.

My collection manager instinct said that rolling a hide was not ideal, but I've been trying to find out if this is true. So I googled "fur museum storage" or something quite close, and I found this page on preserving fur and leather. But something seemed funny. Why was this information coming up on a website for Otolaryngology? That's the fancy word for ear, nose, and throat doctors. Apparently, like many professional associations, they have a museum. And their museum provides pages with rather general info on all kinds of collections. How about that?

The otolaryngology page does say that leather and furs are but stored flat, but I'm going to check out some more google results to corroborate this.