OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

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 “Confederate semi-official imprinted envelope” — 21 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:06 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.
Confederate semi-official imprinted envelope

Confederate semi-official imprinted envelope

Artist not stated in the record · August 16, 1863

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate 2c Andrew Jackson on semi-official imprinted envelope

Confederate 2c Andrew Jackson on semi-official imprinted envelope

Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate official stationery cover

Confederate official stationery cover

Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
5c Jefferson Davis vertical pair on Confederate semi-official cover

5c Jefferson Davis vertical pair on Confederate semi-official cover

Artist not stated in the record · January 10, 1863

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate semi-official cover

Confederate semi-official cover

Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate cover

Confederate cover

Artist not stated in the record · Postmark: March 4, 1861

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate cover with U. S. postal issue used after secession

Confederate cover with U. S. postal issue used after secession

Artist not stated in the record · February 26, 1861

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate cover

Confederate cover

Artist not stated in the record · April 1, 1861

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate cover

Confederate cover

Artist not stated in the record · February 26, 1861

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
3c Washington on Confederate Civil War Patriotic cover

3c Washington on Confederate Civil War Patriotic cover

Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate mourning cover

Confederate mourning cover

Artist not stated in the record · May 14, 1861

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Confederate cover with U. S. postal issue used after secession

Confederate cover with U. S. postal issue used after secession

Artist not stated in the record · DEC 31 / 1860

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
What was queried

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. 21 matched · 21 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 2026-09-01 01:06 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.