Thirty Second International Conference on Information Systems, Shanghai 2011 1 System Adoption and Use in Context: An Exploratory Study of Cyberinfrastructure Youngseek Kim & Kevin Crowston Syracuse University School of Information Studies Research-in-Progress Introduction Cyberinfrastructure refers to the constellation of information and communication technologies (ICT) that support communication, coordination, collaboration and collection, storage, analysis and dissemination of data for distributed groups of researchers. Cyberinfrastructure holds out the promise of revolutionizing the process of scientific discovery, enabling the emergence of data-centric science—sometimes called eScience—in which researchers answer questions through the integration of distributed digital resources and facilities (Hey and Trefethen 2008). Science funding agencies are supporting development of cyberinfrastructure for various scientific communities as a way to leverage their investment in the research. However, we believe that cyberinfrastructure technologies are adopted and used less often than they are deployed. To achieve the promise of eScience, it is necessary to understand the factors that influence researchers’ cyberinfrastructure adoption and continued use. For at least 30 years, information systems scholars have sought to identify factors that influence individual users’ adoption and use of ICTs. Numerous theories and models have been proposed, as we review below. However, to date these theories have mostly considered adoption and use of a single system in isolation; while increasingly systems are deployed and used in environments that include many other systems. Cyberinfrastructure is a case in point, as the term refers not to any particular system but rather to the constellation of technologies addressing various aspects of the scientific process. For many, cyberinfrastructure means high performance computing, e.g., grid computing to support simulations and analyses of large volumes of data. On a smaller scale, tools may support collection, storage, analysis and modeling of data (e.g., statistical packages, simulation tools or metadata generators). But cyberinfrastructure also includes Internet-enabled applications to connect researchers to a variety of resources: Data, knowledge and collaborators. Data might come from instruments accessed remotely via the Internet or from increasingly voluminous data repositories accessed directly or via federated searches. Knowledge might be captured in digital libraries of journal articles or, increasingly, of article pre-prints. More ambitiously, rather than in papers, researchers might represent results in knowledge bases that can be searched manually to find relevant prior work or automatically, to identify novel relations among the findings. Connections between data and knowledge can also be made explicit, e.g., linking publications to data sources through data citations. Scientific workflow tools capture analysis steps explicitly in an executable format, enabling reuse and sharing of analyses as well as data. At a more infrastructural level, cyberinfrastructure requires tools for identifying objects (e.g., EZID, DOI, PURL, Handles), authorizing users (e.g., CILogin or OpenID) and preserving data and metadata (e.g., LOCKSS). Finally, cyberinfrastructure applications include collaborative technologies to support scientific collaboration (Wulf 1993), ranging from simple email and mailing lists, to newer collaborative applications such as wikis. For example, discussion boards linked to papers in pre-print archives have been proposed to augment or replace some functions of conventional peer review (Nentwich 2003). To conceptualize such constellations of ICT, we draw on the concept of a ‘digital assemblage’, which we define as a collection of computing elements and software-based systems assembled to address an individual’s diverse computing needs. For example, in writing this paper we used Google Docs, Microsoft Word, EndNote, Google Scholar and a range of library databases, a collection of articles as PDFs in various folders on a laptop, email, ManuscriptCentral, not to mention more infrastructural technologies such as the Internet, Mac OS X, Windows and laptops. Still other tools support different aspects of scholarly life, such as PowerPoint, Camtasia, iMovie, BlackBoard, TurnItIn, Excel, PeopleSoft and email (again), all used to support online teaching but in varying combinations. The conception of an assemblage emphasizes that digitally-enabled work is increasingly done by drawing on multiple systems that are