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. 9 shown for “Cowrie shell bead” — 64 records examined, 55 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 21:08 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Cowrie shell bead
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1850–1640 B.C.
Helmet crest from a nja masquerade
Grassfields artists · ca. 1800–80
Cowrie Shell Girdle of Sithathoryunet
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1887–1813 B.C.
Cowrie shell bead
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1878–1840 B.C.
Girdle with gold and lapis wallet-shaped beads
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1479–1425 BCE
Palepai maju (ceremonial banner)
Paminggir artists · 18th–19th century
Cowrie shell
Artist not stated in the record · 332–30 BCE
Bead
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1491–1473 BCE
Inrō with Peacocks and Flowers
Koma Yasutada · 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. 513 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. 48042 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 21:08 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.