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 “Frederick Everhart McKinley's 1881 School Desk and Seat Patent Model” — 40 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 13:16 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Frederick Everhart McKinley's 1881 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1881

Frederick Everhart McKinley's 1882 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1882

Frank G. Johnson's 1881 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1881

Charles M. Hughes's 1881 Hinge Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1881

Benjamin Allen's 1875 Folding Seat Hinge Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1875

Eldridge J. Smith's 1872 School Desk and Seat Patent Model fragment
Artist not stated in the record · 1872

Henry R. Fry's 1875 School Seat Standard Support Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1875

Henry G. Sellman's 1871 Improved Frame for School Desk and Seat Patent Model fragment
Artist not stated in the record · 1871

William Joeckel's 1861 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1861

John Mott's 1881 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1881

Morris Lancaster's 1876 School Desk and Seat Hinge Improvement Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

William A. Slaymaker's 1870 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1870
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1535346 matched · 40 examined · 3 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 2026-09-01 13:16 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.