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. 7 shown for “Door tag” — 42 records examined, 35 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-08 17:42 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 Fishermen (Fantastic Scene)
Paul Cézanne · ca. 1875

Door tag
Artist not stated in the record · 2001-2003

Gavia stellata
Artist not stated in the record · 27 Dec 1936

White suit jacket worn by Melvin Van Peebles
Artist not stated in the record · 2002-2006

Carved wooden cane owned by Carl Brashear
Artist not stated in the record · after 1966

Foot Warmer and Lantern Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1853

Swinging doors from Muse Bar, the home bar of Isaiah Muse
Unidentified · 1970s
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. 2 matched · 2 examined · 1 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.1 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 18914 matched · 40 examined · 34 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.6 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-08 17:42 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.