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. 16 shown for “Cucumis melo L.” — 45 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-04 20:04 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.
Bed curtain

Bed curtain

Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

Public domainThe Met
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 187

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Doge Enrico Dandolo crowns Baldovino the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, by Giacomo Leonardis

Doge Enrico Dandolo crowns Baldovino the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople

Giacomo Leonardis · 1745–94

Public domainThe Met
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 187

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Small stone axe

Small stone axe

Artist not stated in the record · 5th–3rd millennium BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 25 Dec 1926

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Le Rossignol Posé sur un Buisson (A Nightengale Standing on a Bush), plate 14 from "Lux Claustri ou La Lumière du Cloitre" (The Light of the Cloisters), by Jacques Callot

Le Rossignol Posé sur un Buisson (A Nightengale Standing on a Bush), plate 14 from "Lux Claustri ou La Lumière du Cloitre" (The Light of the Cloisters)

Jacques Callot · 1621–35

Public domainThe Met
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · Jan 1969

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · Mar 1910

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 19 Jul 1976

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 1 Dec 1973

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 16 Jun 1962

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · Aug 1907

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 6 Mar 1968

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Cucumis melo L.

Cucumis melo L.

Artist not stated in the record · 12 Aug 1910

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. 5 matched · 5 examined · 1 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.4 shown
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1291251 matched · 40 examined · 2 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 2026-09-04 20:04 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.