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. 24 shown for “Letter” — 64 records examined, 20 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 14:15 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Heqanakht Letter I
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1961–1917 B.C.
Transatlantic Cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1817
The Letter
Camille Corot · ca. 1865
V-Mail letter sheet
Artist not stated in the record · July 20, 1944
Letter
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer · 1837
V-Mail letter sheet
Artist not stated in the record · July 20, 1944
Letter
Shiba Sonome 斯波園女 · 1696
Transatlantic Cover to North Orange, New Jersey
Artist not stated in the record · 1872
Letter
Song Jue · early 17th century
Transatlantic cover to Great Britain
Artist not stated in the record · November 30, 1826
Letter
Tanomura Chokunyū 田能村直入 · mid- to late 19th century
SS Great Western
Artist not stated in the record · June 2, 1840
Letter
Wang Ao · late 15th or early 16th century
Transatlantic cover to France
Artist not stated in the record · December 7, 1850
Letter
Song Jue · early 17th century
Transatlantic cover to Italy
Artist not stated in the record · August 14, 1854
Letter
Shōkadō Shōjō · early 17th century
Transatlantic Cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1844
Letter
Wang Zhideng
William Edwards folded letter
Artist not stated in the record · December 7, 1848
Letter
Rai San’yō 頼山陽 · ca. 1820–28
Transatlantic cover to France
Artist not stated in the record · June 17, 1856
Letter
Wang Duo
Bristol-New York Government Packet Service
Artist not stated in the record · May 1711
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. 13726 matched · 24 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 12854 matched · 40 examined · 20 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 2026-08-28 14:15 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.