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. 15 shown for “Central Pacific Railroad mail car model” — 43 records examined, 20 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 21:43 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Animal pendant
Artist not stated in the record · 1–1000 CE

Central Pacific Railroad mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1870-1885

Griswold and Gunnison Confederate Percussion Revolver, serial no. 2651
Griswold and Gunnison · 1864

Burlington mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930-1970

Laborers at Quartermaster's Wharf, Alexandria, Virginia
Andrew Joseph Russell · 1863–65

Louisville & Nashville mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · 1914-1957

Chicago & North West railroad mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · 1862-c. 1957

Santa Fe Railway mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1960s-1974

Atlantic & Pacific Railroad Owney tag
Artist not stated in the record · 1888-1897

Advertisement for the New York Central Railroad
Artist not stated in the record · 1944

Mail sack
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1890-1910

Photograph of Railway Post Office clerk in mail car
Artist not stated in the record · 1913

New York Central railway mail car model
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1914-1968

Bunkerhill Car House Owney tag
Artist not stated in the record · 1888-1897

Photograph of wreck of the Southern Railway train
Artist not stated in the record · August 15, 1930
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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.3 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1838715 matched · 40 examined · 20 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 21:43 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.