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 “Four buttons from a Pullman Porter uniform” — 42 records examined, 22 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 21:41 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
John Barnard
John Michael Rysbrack · 1744

Four buttons from a Pullman Porter uniform
Artist not stated in the record · early 20th-mid 20th Century

Uniform vest owned by Pullman Porter Robert Thomas
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1920

Uniform cap owned by Pullman Porter Robert Thomas
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1920

Uniform cap worn by a Pullman porter
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s - 1960s

Uniform coat owned by Pullman Porter Robert Thomas
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1920

Uniform cap for a Pullman Porter
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s - 1960s

Jacket for a Pullman porter uniform
Artist not stated in the record · 1900-1969

Uniform cap for a Pullman attendant
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1940s

Jacket from Fruit of Islam uniform
Artist not stated in the record · 1950-1959

Photographic postcard of Pullman Porter, T.R. Joseph
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1930s

Uniform cap worn by Pullman Porter Philip Henry Logan
Artist not stated in the record · 1966
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. 1992838 matched · 40 examined · 21 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 2026-08-31 21:41 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.