I have been working in the Public Reocrds Office in Nijmegen. It holds the archives of the city and of a number of villages and towns around Nijmegen. I enjoy working there, as my colleagues and my boss are more than OK. We do not use ifp trash, of course, except where everybody has been fooled into using it, in computing when printing and scanning. But we use A4 paper, not 11 or 12 inch paper sizes. Shelf space is measured in stretching meters, symbolized m1, about 8 archive-boxes go into 1 m1. We have 9 km1 in the storage room, kept in dry air conditions and a constant temperature of 17 degrees Celsius. When we will get moving racks, space will increase to 16 km1. And Arnhem and Nijmegen will build a large storage room together to store their archives that are not used often. People come to do research on their families or on history. In the old archives we find our own traditional measuring units in abundance. One encounters land tax forms measuring the morgens or old acres; and after 1820 I see them replaced by metric forms in hectares. I respect our own traditional units when I encounter them there, as once they *were* ours. Ifp crops up in English language texts. Today I saw a magazine from 1953 about economic relationships between Scandinavia and The Netherlands. There was some English language information about a ferry being built for the stretch between Finland and Stockholm. As ship building was as addicted to Imperial in that era as smokers are to sigarets, the data were in feet and inches. Its length was 300 ft, etc. etc., it would have done the BWMA proud. Ship bulding is metric now, and the ferries between these two nations are now the largest cruise-ferries on earth, about 200 m long.
Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
