This paper addresses the design and implementation of an adaptive document version management scheme. Existing schemes typically assume: (i) a priori expectations for how versions will be manipulated and (ii) fixed priorities between storage space usage and average access time. They are not appropriate for all possible applications. We introduce the concept of document version pertinence levels in order to select the best scheme for given requirements (e.g., access patterns, trade-offs between access time and storage space). Pertinence levels can be considered as heuristics to dynamically select the appropriate scheme to improve the effectiveness of version management. We present a testbed for evaluating XML version management schemes.