  Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of
information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles
and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author
side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty
of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author
identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe
preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services
based on them, and plans to make this information useful beyond the boundaries
of arXiv.
