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 “Aphanothece conferta var. brevis N.L. Gardner” — 40 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-10 20:37 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Aphanothece conferta var. brevis N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 12 Feb 1915

Aphanothece conferta var. brevis N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 12 Feb 1915 to 15 Feb 1915

Aphanothece microscopica var. granulosa N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 17 Mar 1915

Tolypothrix penicillata var. brevis N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 28 Dec 1914

Tolypothrix penicillata var. brevis N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 28 Dec 1914

Aphanothece gelatinosa N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · Sep 1926

Aphanothece bacilloidea N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 1 Mar 1915
Cryptopleura brevis N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 23 Oct 1926

Dermocarpa protea Setch. & N.L. Gardner in N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · Jul 1901

Xenococcus pyriformis Setch. & N.L. Gardner in N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · May 1914

Dermocarpa suffulta Setch. & N.L. Gardner in N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 13 Apr 1910

Dermocarpa suffulta Setch. & N.L. Gardner in N.L. Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 13 Apr 1910
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 246149 matched · 40 examined · 1 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 2026-09-10 20:37 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.