In spite of its great relevance, both for the catalogues of the past and for today's ones, authority control has been and still is the "poor relative" of cataloguing, the often neglected or overlooked "other half" if we compare it to the more striking one: the creation of bibliographic records by document description. On the one hand the study on Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR), on the other hand the new versions of authority control standards, Guidelines for authority records and references (GARR) and UNIMARC manual, Authorities format, with the related documents, are important steps towards a thorough consideration of access points, a not merely instrumental and managerial consideration but one stimulating us to think about future perspectives.