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. 24 shown for “Albany Letter Express label from 2nd printing of 500” — 64 records examined, 22 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 21:27 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Young Lady in 1866
Edouard Manet · 1866

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

Boy with a Sword
Edouard Manet · 1861

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

The Letter
Pietro Longhi (Pietro Falca) · 1746

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

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)
Paul Gauguin · 1891

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

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) · 1653

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

The Adoration of the Shepherds
Andrea Mantegna · shortly after 1450

Unattached label from the Waukesha, Wisconsin local service
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)
Robert Campin · ca. 1427–32

Unattached label from the Waukesha, Wisconsin local service
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child
Léon Bonnat · 1869–70

Unattached label from the Waukesha, Wisconsin local service
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

Joan of Arc
Jules Bastien-Lepage · 1879

Unattached label from the Waukesha, Wisconsin local service
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)
Edgar Degas · 1865

Unattached label from the Waukesha, Wisconsin local service
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1970

The Death of the Virgin
Bartolomeo Vivarini · 1484

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

View of Toledo
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) · ca. 1599–1600

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. 190 matched · 24 examined · 7 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 7484733 matched · 40 examined · 15 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 21:27 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.