The paper intends to present the experience gained in the field of authority control for the project Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI secolo (EDIT16) managed by ICCU with the cooperation of libraries, 1200 until today, in all the country. Within the projet ICCU is the scientific referent and coordinator, not only in the field of catalographic standards, compiling specific rules that have been integrated in the years, but also regarding the problems related to the choices and the accepted and variant forms of authors and printers. The necessity of setting from the centre some control lists for the recognition of the exemplars of the editions obliged to the priority of defining authority entries – in a stage in which the possibility of an automated management was far – using the traditional paper-based workflow.