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. 12 shown for “Albany Letter Express definitive handstamp of moveable rubber type” — 40 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 23:15 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.

Albany Letter Express definitive handstamp of moveable rubber type
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

Albany Letter Express definitive handstamp delivered March 24, 1970
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

First trial impression of handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

"NO FDL SHOW: PANDEMIC" postmark handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · July 2020

Albany Letter Express label from 1st printing of 500
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

Albany Letter Express label from 2nd printing of 500
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

1865 adhesive label of S.A. Taylor’s Albany Letter Express
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

Maryland Line, MD, postmark handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1870

Express from Richmond to Louisville posted to Boston cover
Artist not stated in the record · August 17, 1861

Express from Richmond to Louisville posted to New York cover
Artist not stated in the record · August 8, 1861

Union Patriotic Cover with Steamship Handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

Sketch for design for label
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970
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. 7462632 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-08-31 23:15 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.