Versioning materiality: Documenting evidence of past binding structures

Describing the structure and materials of bookbindings is an essential task of the study of the history of the book. Books with repaired or replaced binding structures are of particular interest given that often evidence of one or even two or more previous structures remain on the book. The results of rebinding can be considered as separate versions of the binding structure. Evidence of the binding structures need to be matched with the corresponding version of the binding. This helps formulating provenance.

In this paper we discuss problems of documenting binding evidence including a) the reuse of earlier components in later bindings and b) the reuse of components originally belonging to other books. After a review of diferent approaches to the description of earlier bindings we focus on the CIDOCCRM as a possible way of modelling the versions of bindings through an event-centric approach and ofering a number of ebamples. iinally, we discuss the advantages of using the CRM for versioning as well as the limitations of our method.

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