OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
OpenGlyph
Images / art

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. 5 shown for “Mangarevan artist” — 41 records examined, 36 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-26 20:21 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.
Tiki (male figure), by Mangarevan artist

Tiki (male figure)

Mangarevan artist · Early 19th century

Public domainThe Met
Society of American Artists, Jury of 1890, by Unidentified Artist

Society of American Artists, Jury of 1890

Unidentified Artist · 1890

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Winslow Homer (with six other artists, including E. L. Henry and Alfred C. Howland), by Unidentified Artist

Winslow Homer (with six other artists, including E. L. Henry and Alfred C. Howland)

Unidentified Artist · c. 1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Anders Zorn, by Unidentified Artist

Anders Zorn

Unidentified Artist · c. 1896

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
John Wesley Jarvis, by Unidentified Artist

John Wesley Jarvis

Unidentified Artist · c. 1821

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
What was queried

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. 1 matched · 1 examined · 0 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. 64101 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 2026-08-26 20:21 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.

Read the method
Elsewhere in the catalogue
Section 01Character index6 hand-compiled entries, each with sources, version scope, and a confidence value.Section 02NewsWhat has already cleared the US term, and what clears next — January 1, 2027.Section 03MethodThree status values, three confidence values, and copyright kept apart from trademark.