I have now been working in the Nijmegen Public Records Office for about a year and I found out something very interesting: the sequence year-month-day was already used in the 17th century, among other notations. I found it in baptism, marriage and burial records from a religious denomination in Nijmegen. What is now ISO 8601 dates back for about 300 years! This notation has also been the standard one in the archives for decades. The AM/PM clock was sometimes used in the Netherlands in the 17th century; I found it in records from the Estates General, a precursor of the present day parliament, in the 17th century as well. That is really where it belongs, in the past. Many financial calculations were made in Roman numerals and the money was not decimal as well. Present day archivists and researchers get in trouble with this stuff and have to master Roman numerals and non-decimal calculations. Compared with money from that era, the old weights and measures are less hard to grasp.
We measure the archives and records, packed in boxes, in stretching meters which we symbolize as m ^1. We have now 16 km^1 of records in our storage room. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
