If talking about authority lists in the Servizio bibliotecario nazionale – Ancient books and Modern books – already means to be in the presence of a project that has entered its executive stage, it isn’t possible to say the same for the Manus database, which within SBN manages the automation of the manuscript material owned by Italian libraries. Manus was built as a unspecialized database, meaning that it can manage, through its complex structure, documents which are very distant from a chronological point of view: from the medieval codex to the contemporary manuscript and the collections of letters. Until today Manus archive contains about 5000 manuscript descriptions, which already create huge problems from an authority list point of view and oblige to structure a complex work organization.