Patterns are descriptions of design techniques. They are contained in documents; there are books of patterns, there are papers that describe patterns, and some patterns are on the web. People have been writing patterns for software for a little over ten years. There are now so many patterns that nobody knows them all. Sometimes people use the same name for different patterns. Sometimes they use different names for identical patterns. We need a database to keep track of patterns. The Authoritative Pattern Server (APS) will contain information about patterns and the documents that contain them. Since different documents might spell the names of the same people differently, it will not try to keep track of individual authors, though it will search for documents with an author with a particular name. It will have a web interface for adding and editing information. It will give a unique URL for each document and patterns, and be able to describe documents and documents in a variety of formats.