OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

Two archives, queried live.

Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 13 shown for “1838 Day's Patent Model of a Cordage Machine” — 41 records examined, 26 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-02 19:21 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.
The Jabach Family, by Charles Le Brun

The Jabach Family

Charles Le Brun · ca. 1660

Public domainThe Met
1838 Day's Patent Model of a Cordage Machine

1838 Day's Patent Model of a Cordage Machine

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-02-07

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Patent Model for a Machine for Smoothing the Sides of Type, by Bruce, Jr., David

Patent Model for a Machine for Smoothing the Sides of Type

Bruce, Jr., David · ca 1838

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Parsons's Patent Model of a Cloth Shearing Machine

1838 Parsons's Patent Model of a Cloth Shearing Machine

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-11-25

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Holland's Doubling and Twisting Silk Machine

1838 Holland's Doubling and Twisting Silk Machine

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-10-10

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 - Alden Sibley's Patent Model of a Calico Printing Machine

1838 - Alden Sibley's Patent Model of a Calico Printing Machine

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-07-09

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Mason's Patent Model of a Speeder for Roving Cotton

1838 Mason's Patent Model of a Speeder for Roving Cotton

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-05-04

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Patent Model of a Type-Distributing Machine

Patent Model of a Type-Distributing Machine

Artist not stated in the record · ca 1854

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Faber's Patent Model of a Hand Card

1838 Faber's Patent Model of a Hand Card

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-08-01

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Yerkes's Patent Model of a Spindle and Flyer

1838 Yerkes's Patent Model of a Spindle and Flyer

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-06-12

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
1838 Bigelow's Patent Model of a Loom

1838 Bigelow's Patent Model of a Loom

Artist not stated in the record · 1838-01-06

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Patent Model for Paper Bag Machine, by Knight, Margaret E.

Patent Model for Paper Bag Machine

Knight, Margaret E. · ca 1879

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Mathematical Table, Pierson Machine For Calculating Interest, by Pierson, Albert C.

Mathematical Table, Pierson Machine For Calculating Interest

Pierson, Albert C. · 1867

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
What was queried

Where these records came from.

Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.

  • The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field: isPublicDomain. 1 matched · 1 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.1 shown
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3864383 matched · 40 examined · 26 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-02 19:21 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.

Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.

An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.