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. 13 shown for “5c Buffalo Balloon imperforate vertical pair” — 41 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-07 09:33 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 Emperor's Carpet
Artist not stated in the record · second half 16th century
5c Buffalo Balloon imperforate vertical pair
Artist not stated in the record · 1877
5c Grant imperforate vertical pair
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · 1894
2c Washington horizontal imperforate vertical pair
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · 1919
1c Washington horizontal imperforate vertical pair
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · 1919
10c Washington vertical pair
Artist not stated in the record · 1847
5c Ulysses S. Grant proof pair on stamp paper
Artist not stated in the record · 1890
5c Washington coil pair
Artist not stated in the record · 1909
5c Davis single
Artist not stated in the record · 1862
5c Ulysses S. Grant proof vertical pair
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · 1890
5c Jefferson Davis "London print" on advertising cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1862
2c Harding vertical imperforate pair
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · September 1, 1923
5c Abraham Lincoln imperforate top arrow block of four
Bureau of Engraving and Printing · 1908
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. 30429 matched · 40 examined · 2 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 2026-09-07 09:33 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.