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 “Lyre-Shaped Belt Buckle” — 64 records examined, 37 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 08:05 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Lyre-Shaped Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · 600–700

Snake-form belt buckle
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1890

Belt
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1330–50

Civil War-era belt buckle from Point of Pines Plantation
Unidentified · ca. 1860

Rock Crystal Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 500 (buckle), 500–600 (tongue)

Blazer, tie, and belt worn by Ted Corbitt for the 1952 Helsinki XV Olympics
Artist not stated in the record · 1952

Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · 500–550

Mudcloth ensemble created by Twain's Twines
Twain's Twines, American, founded 1990 · 1990s

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · 550–600

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 600

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · 600–700

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · 7th century

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · mid-500s

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · late 6th–7th century

Belt Buckle
Artist not stated in the record · about 600

Belt Buckle
Unger Brothers · ca. 1900
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. 373 matched · 24 examined · 1 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. 401 matched · 40 examined · 36 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.4 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 08:05 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.