Custer, Mark wrote:
> 1.       In our P4 documents, all of our names in the text included a 
> “reg” attribute, which included an authorized form of that name (which, 
> as LC authorities go, are IDs as well, though they needn’t be anymore, 
> as they also have LC control numbers)
> 
> ·         Ex. <name reg=”Caldwell, Robert C.”>R. C. C.</name>

I would have converted this (by XSLT) to:
<name>
    <choice>
        <orig>R. C. C.</orig>
        <reg>Caldwell, Robert C.</reg>
    </choice>
</name>

myself.  Though of course a better way might be, as Lou suggests, to 
point to abstracted <person> data.  something like:

<name ref="people.xml#CALD001">R.C.C.</name>

and in people .xml:

<listPerson>
     <person xml:id="CALD001">
         <persName type="initial">R.C.C.</persName>
         <persName type="reg">Caldwell, Robert C.</persName>
         <birth when="1814-05-07">May 7, 1814</birth>
         <death when="1891">Sometime in 1891</death>
         <bibl>
             <ptr target="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Caldwell"/>
	    <!-- probably not the one you meant? -->
         </bibl>
     </person>
     <!-- more people -->
</listPerson>

Since that would give you a place to store any additional information.

> 2.       Our digital repository doesn’t currently account for the 
> inclusion of an authority file.  If we were to have one, though, I 
> figured that we could use something like the “key” attribute to point 
> those names (and later, subjects too) to their specific authority (in 
> this case “person”, not the name) records (so, the “keys” or “xml:ids” 
> would be local, but they could still be linked to things like Worldcat 
> Identities: http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities/ ).  The TEI documentation 
> states that the key “may be a unique identifier from a database”, so 
> that’s the assumption that I was working under (assuming we added an 
> authority file of some sort).

You could, of course, just point to that authority file as it is. OCLC 
gives unique URIs for each individual so you could just do

<name ref="http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities/lccn-n82-246285">R.C.C.</name>

Just my two pence,

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk