Libraries do something they call "name authority control". For most people in IT, this would be called "assigning unique identifiers to names." Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn't done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know.
VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File
VIAF is a joint project of the Library of Congress (LC), the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and OCLC. The project's goal is to match and link the library authority files.
The search box at the top of this page searches a prototype of VIAF, which is derived from the personal name authority and related bibliographic data of LC, DNB, and BnF. Matches are shown as links between records (in MARC-21 998 fields).
More information can be found at the OCLC Research VIAF Project page.
Author Authority Files for 2006-12-01 (February 22, 2007)
This is a collection of XML files describing the authoritive aliases for author names (and perhaps book subjects?)