This project grew out of our work in the monastery of Saint Catherine, as it became increasingly evident that the existing terms used to describe bindings were not adequate for our purposes. We subsequently received AHRC funding to create a glossary of bookbinding terms, which was to appear first in English and Greek, with the intention of adding other languages whenever this might be possible. Its origin of the glossary in a Greek library limited its usefulness for books from other areas of the world, and the Language of Bindings project was initiated to extend its range across Europe with a new data structure based on Semantic Web technologies and a much more ambitious aim of creating a reference tool holding details and pictures of bindings from 19 European countries, dating from the ninth to the nineteenth century. While we continue to seek funding for this project, we received a further AHRC grant to pursue the thesaurus element of the Language of Bindings project and the creation of a set of guidelines for the description of historic bookbindings (in preparation, under the title Coming to Terms).