Products and Product Ownership¶
About¶
The Product Owner operates at the center of the product ecosystem, ensuring that stakeholder needs are understood, customer input is effectively translated, and development efforts are aligned with strategic objectives. They hold decision authority while maintaining continuous collaboration across institutional and technical boundaries.
This document lays out product ownership for products in the Digital Collections unit. It describes what is expected for the product owner, whom they represent, and what is necessary to successfully be a product owner for a service or application.
Terminology¶
Stakeholder: Any individual or group impacted by the product, directly or indirectly. This includes end users, institutional
units, and external parties whose work or outcomes are affected.
Customer: A subset of stakeholders who are actively engaged in the product development process. Customers interact directly
with the Product Owner, contribute requirements, provide feedback, and influence product direction.
Roles¶
Product Stewardship (Governance & Long-Term Planning): Ensure the long-term health, sustainability, and strategic alignment of the product. Establish and maintain governance structures, guide longterm product direction, and ensure continuity across development cycles. Balance immediate delivery needs with future viability, including technical sustainability, institutional alignment, and evolving stakeholder needs.
Stakeholder Management: Maintain awareness of all stakeholder groups, ensure clear stakeholder identification and definition, and understand their needs and their impact on the product, and the product’s impact on each stakeholder group.
Requirements Gathering: Actively engage customers to identify needs, anticipate requirements, and refine problem spaces.
Backlog Curation: Own and prioritize the product backlog in collaboration with the development team, balancing competing priorities while maintaining a coherent product vision.
Champion / Approval Authority: Serve as the final decision-maker for product direction, scope, and acceptance of work. Act as the primary advocate for the product, ensuring it receives appropriate development time, resources, and organizational support. Represent the product in prioritization discussions, defends its value, and ensures its needs are clearly articulated.
Sprint Participation: Engage in sprint planning, reviews, and ongoing team interaction to ensure alignment and delivery quality.
Archipelago¶
Archipelago Commons is an open-source digital repository and digital asset management (DAM) platform built on top of Drupal and developed by the Metropolitan New York Library Council. It’s designed primarily for the GLAM community to manage, preserve, and provide access to digital collections. As of 2026, it is the primary solution for cultural heritage collections at Texas A&M University Libraries.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Repository: https://github.com/tamulib/cap Development Support from Technology Services: No (DevOps and Deployment only)
Instances and Clusters¶
Dev
Pre
Prod
PODS and Containers¶
esmero-cantaloupe: Used as image server in each cluster
esmero-minio: Used as storage instance in dev and pre. Not used in prod.
esmero-nlp: Used for complex processing including in the OCR process
esmero-php: Used as Drupal, PHP, and Drush layer.
esmero-solr: Solr instance
esmero-web: Web server
Product Owner Expectations¶
Serves as technical expert of platform in the Libraries
Monitor Archipelago community development and contribute issues and other problems as necessary
Liaises with Archipelago community
Listen to feedback from library stakeholders and bring problems or solutions to Archipelago community or digital collections team
Leads troubleshooting of problems with platform
Avalon Media System¶
About¶
Avalon is an open-source system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: No (Third Party — Consume) Campus Category: Common Supported By: Fedora Related servers: pyavalon
Instances and Clusters¶
Dev
Pre
Prod
PODS and Containers¶
kaltura: streaming server
avalon-db: database server
avalon: application server
avalon-solr: solr instance
avalon-redis: caching layer
avalonworker: not sure?
Product Owner Expectations¶
Serves as technical expert of platform in the Libraries
Monitors Avalon Slack channel
Attends monthly Avalon calls and represents TAMU Libraries
Determines roadmap and next steps for Avalon migration
Cantaloupe¶
Cantaloupe is an open-source dynamic image server for on-demand generation of derivatives of high-resolution source images.
It is currently the service behind Fedora collections only.
Development Support from Technology Services: No (Not listed as a Technology Services product) Serves: iriiifservice Product owner: Mark Baggett
Instances and Clusters¶
Dev
Pre
Prod
PODS and Containers¶
cantaloupe
Product Owner Expectations¶
Serves as technical expert of the platform, its delegates file, and the IIIF Image API
Troubleshoots issues with the platform
Future Plans¶
Spin down once Fedora migration is complete.
CAP¶
About¶
The Curator’s Administrative Platform provides a user interface for Fedora repositories. This functionality could be extended to other repositories such as DSpace 7 with some development work. CAP ensures that curators use valid RDF predicates for triples about Fedora resources. More details are on the Lyrasis/Duraspace website at https://duraspace.org/introducing-cap-curators-administrative-platform-from-texas-am-university-libraries/ and in the code base hosted at https://github.com/tamulib/cap.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Repository: https://github.com/tamulib/cap Development Support from Technology Services: Yes Campus Category: Unique Supports: Fedora, SAGE Supported By: Mirador, Tamu Library Components, Weaver
Product Owner Expectations¶
Listen to feedback from library stakeholders and articulate problems to dev team
Serve as technical expert
Advocate for development
Instances and Clusters¶
Dev
Pre
Prod
PODS and Containers¶
cap
Future Plans¶
Spin down once Fedora migration is complete.
Fedora¶
About¶
Fedora is a digital repository that uses linked data (RDF). It is used as the assets management system for SAGE and Spotlight collections. The same instance is also used for Avalon Media System, although it functions very differently. Specifically, Avalon only uses Fedora for asset management. It does not use Fedora’s Solr or Fuseki instance which can be problematic for SAGE collections.
Also, TAMU has its own specific flavor of RDF based loosely around PCDM.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: No (Third Party — Consume) Campus Category: Common Supports: Avalon, IIIF Service, SAGE, Spotlight Supported By: CAP
IA Bookreader¶
IA Bookreader was developed by the Internet Archive and open source contributors to provide online access to scanned books.
Development Support from Technology Services: No (Not listed as a Technology Services product)
IRIIIFService¶
About¶
The IIIF Service provides IIIF manifest generation from DSpace RDF and/or Fedora PCDM.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: Yes Campus Category: Unique Supports: From the Page, Spotlight Supported By: DSpace, Fedora
MAGPIE¶
About¶
MAGPIE (Metadata Assignment GUI Providing Ingest and Export) provides a suite of features for curating documents for deposit to repositories.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: Yes Campus Category: Unique Supported By: SAF Creator, Weaver
Mirador¶
About¶
Mirador is an open-source, web-based, multi-window image viewing platform with the ability to zoom, display, compare, and annotate images.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: No (Third Party — Consume) Campus Category: Common Supports: CAP, SAGE, Spotlight Supported By: Cantaloupe
OAKTrust¶
Development Support from Technology Services: No (Not listed as a Technology Services product)
Open Journal System¶
Development Support from Technology Services: No (Not listed as a Technology Services product)
pyavalon¶
SAF Creator¶
About¶
SAF Creator is a desktop application that takes spreadsheets of metadata and documents and creates a DSpace SAF archive.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: Yes (Third Party — Contribute) Campus Category: Common Supports: DSpace, MAGPIE
SAGE¶
About¶
SAGE (Solr AGgregation Engine) can combine Solr indices from multiple sources and make their documents discoverable in user-configurable views.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: Yes Campus Category: Common Supported By: Avalon, CAP, DSpace, Fedora, Mirador, Tamu Library Components, Weaver
Spotlight¶
About¶
Spotlight is open-source software that enables librarians, curators, and other content experts to easily build feature-rich websites that showcase collections.
Current Product Owner: Mark Baggett Development Support from Technology Services: Yes (Third Party — Contribute) Campus Category: Common Supported By: IIIF Service, Mirador