OpenTwo 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 “Cowrie Shell” — 64 records examined, 52 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 21:08 UTC · served from cache, not re-queried for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Cowrie shell
Artist not stated in the record · 332–30 BCE
Ceremonial basket adorned with cowrie shells
Unidentified · 2015
Cowrie shell bead
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1850–1640 B.C.
String of cowrie shells
Unidentified · 1800 - 1968
Helmet crest from a nja masquerade
Grassfields artists · ca. 1800–80
Cowrie Shell
Artist not stated in the record
Cowrie Shell Girdle of Sithathoryunet
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1887–1813 B.C.
Cowrie Shell Girdle, Lion Bracelets, Bracelets with the Name of Amenemhat III, and Anklets of Princess Sithathoryunet
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1887–1813 B.C.
String of cowrie shells
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1080–343 BCE
String of cowrie shells
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1080–343 BCE
Cowrie shell
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century
Reliquary figure
Mbete-Kota artist · 19th century
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. 201 matched · 24 examined · 15 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.9 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 19027 matched · 40 examined · 37 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.3 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 21:08 UTC, replayed here rather than repeated. 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.