wellcomelibrary.org

This is the CloudFront distribution for the old wellcomelibrary.org website. It includes the code for redirecting users from the old site to the appropriate wellcomecollection.org URL.

It also includes all the DNS records for the wellcomelibrary.org domain.

Key pieces

• The CloudFront distributions are in the platform account. We have one distribution per subdomain of wellcomelibrary.org (e.g. archives.wellcomelibrary.org, catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org).

• Each CloudFront distribution is connected to a Lambda@Edge function (defined in edge-lambda), which decides whether to redirect the user to the new site, or forward them to the old site.

  (We use Lambda@Edge instead of CloudFront Functions because we sometimes need to make HTTP requests before doing a redirect. e.g. looking up a b-number from a URL so we can find the appropriate works page.)

• The Route 53 hosted zone for wellcomelibrary.org is defined in a D&T account. We create DNS records in that hosted zone that point to our CloudFront distributions.

Key subdomains/services

• archives.wellcomelibrary.org was a web front-end for the archive catalogue/CALM, powered by an application called DServe. We redirect requests to the Works pages on the new website.

  

• blog.wellcomelibrary.org was the Wellcome Library blog. It's been backed up in the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive, and we redirect requests to the archived version.

  

• search.wellcomelibrary.org was a web front-end for the library catalogue/Sierra, powered by an application called Encore. We redirect requests to the new website.

  Encore was also available at wellcomelibrary.org (no subdomain).

  

• catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org was another web front-end for the library catalogue/Sierra, often referred to as the OPAC (online public access catalogue) or WebPAC.

  We redirect requests to the new website, but only for external users. OPAC has some staff-specific functionality that we want to retain, so staff can still use it with the on-site network or the GlobalProtect VPN.

  

• wellcomelibrary.org/moh/ is a standalone application for browsing the Medical Officer of Health reports. The associated GitHub repo is wellcomecollection/londons-pulse.

  

• wellcomelibrary.org/iiif and other paths (e.g. /service/alto) were IIIF services, including a IIIF Image API and IIIF presentation API. These services are now served from iiif.wc.org, and we redirect any requests for the old URLs to the new URLs.

• libsys.wellcomelibrary.org is the domain for the Sierra API, which is used (among other things) to populate the collections search on wc.org, and power item requesting on wc.org.

How it works

• There are CloudFront distributions for the wellcomelibrary.org domains in the platform account.

• The CloudFront distributions connected to Lambda@Edge function s(defined in edge-lambda), which decides where to redirect the user.

  (We use Lambda@Edge instead of CloudFront Functions because we sometimes need to make HTTP requests before doing a redirect. e.g. looking up a b number from a URL so we can find the appropriate works page. Also, this work was started several years before CloudFront Functions were released.)

• The Route 53 hosted zone for wellcomelibrary.org is defined in a D&T account. We create DNS records in that hosted zone that point to our CloudFront distributions.

• We have staging and prod variants of each subdomain. This allows us to test redirections before we put them live.

How to

• Add a static redirect to wellcomelibrary.org
• Get to the Route 53 Hosted Zone in the AWS Console
• Deploy a new version of the redirection Lambdas