OpenTwo 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. 12 shown for “1853-dated cancel used for only one month in New York City on cover” — 40 records examined, 22 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 03:52 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.
1853-dated cancel used for only one month in New York City on cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1853
5c Franklin on Hyde Park, NY cover
Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson · June 18, 1848
13c Hawaiian Missionary on folded letter
Artist not stated in the record · 1852
New Haven, Connecticut, SAFETY slogan postmark handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · October 6, 1985
Handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · 1985
Taussig US first airmail flight signed by Woodrow Wilson cover and letter
Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918
Letter
Artist not stated in the record · March 29, 1847
Transatlantic cover to London
Artist not stated in the record · December 9, 1865
Transatlantic cover to Florence, Italy
Artist not stated in the record · December 17, 1863
Registered mail ledger dated September 10, 2001
Artist not stated in the record · September 11, 2001
1c Franklin Glen Allen, VA precancel cover
Artist not stated in the record · August 3, 1886
Auxiliary handstamp, UNKNOWN
Artist not stated in the record · September 11, 2001
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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1251 matched · 40 examined · 22 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 2026-09-01 03:52 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.