What do the users really want? [Survey on Internet Shakespeare Editions]

Basic research should not be done or not done according to commercial popularity contests. Matters change to a significant extent, however, when the research involves a cooperatively-created electronic scholarly resource such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE): a resource being developed entirely in the belief that it will be readily used by the electronic community, both scholarly and non-scholarly, at large. The substantial and ongoing electronic/financial resources involved, and the necessity, for both financial and scholarly reasons, of creating an extensive network of those who will not only use the resource but also be willing, where academically qualified, themselves to contribute to it and to help to maintain it, would seem to dictate a user-oriented approach -- an attempt to discover, early on in the project, what the project's potential users really want from such a resource.