In reply to Thomas Sanders' general inquiry on authority files:

As far as I know you can only have one authority file per institution; there-
fore, I think you will have to incorporate your subject, series, and name auth-
ority files all into one.  This is the way both Harvard and Washington Univer-
sity's do theirs.  Little problem is presented by one file as the tags are
unique with a few exceptions (i.e. name/corp. name series); however, the
exceptions are easy to identify once you are familiar with the MARC authority
format.

We have bought the LC authority tapes and plan to load them into an alternate
institution and then derive them into our production file institution in which
our active authority file is kept.

I cannot think of any problems you may have out of the blue, except for the
importance of the codes in the "Head" fixed fields on the OCLC authority
format (they are replaced by three fixed fields on NOTIS).  Unless you code
all the fields as used, you will have to maintain these fields carefully in
order for the merged heading indexes to work properly.

Lucy Barron