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 “Corbin Lock Company” — 40 records examined, 26 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:04 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.

Rural Free Delivery mailbox padlock
Corbin Lock Company · After 1896

Rural Free Delivery mailbox padlock
Corbin Lock Company · After 1896

Street Lamppost Letterbox
Corbin Lock Company · 1889

Doremus lamppost mailbox
Reading Stove Works · Patent date: 1894

Patent model of an envelope-making machine
Artist not stated in the record · November 23, 1858

Rotary registry padlock
Smith & Egge Company · 1881

Star Route registry padlock
Eagle Lock Company · After 1873

Lever registry padlock
Eagle Lock Company · 1875

Lever pouch padlock
Eagle Lock Company · 1891

Star Route registry padlock
Eagle Lock Company · After 1873

Star Route registry padlock
Eagle Lock Company · Date on Shackle: 1873

Star Route registry padlock
Eagle Lock Company · 1873
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. 63837 matched · 40 examined · 26 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 01:04 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.