Families of L-functions and their Symmetry

In [90] the first-named author gave a working definition of a family of automorphic L-functions. Since then there have been a number of works [33], [107], [67] [47], [66] and especially [98] by the second and third-named authors which make it possible to give a conjectural answer for the symmetry type of a family and in particular the universality class predicted in [64] for the distribution of the zeros near s=1/2. In this note we carry this out after introducing some basic invariants associated to a family.