On Oct 1, 2011, at 10:13 AM, Mehdi Salehi wrote:

> Thanks Richard,
> and is there any way to determine the manufacturing date of a cartridge from
> its serial number or something like that?

The best reference for your site is the invoice for when the tapes were 
purchased, as connected with the barcoding that would be applied soon after 
receiving the shipment. That would provide warranty protection. I doubt that 
any code numbers on the cartridge would provide date of manufacture.

The cartridge memory might provide some info - I haven't explored that.
There's a freeware tapeutil extension available at 
http://www.mesa.nl/pub/tapeutil/ which provides some info.

There are also various commercial products to help with tape surety:
http://www.mptapes.com/veritape/index.html
http://www.maxell-cma.com/