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 “New Hampshire and Vermont postal route map” — 41 records examined, 10 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 16:00 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
New Hampshire and Vermont postal route map
Artist not stated in the record · 1912

Concord-Style stagecoach model
Artist not stated in the record · 1858-1890s

Mud wagon-style stagecoach model
Artist not stated in the record · 1868-1890s

Post route map of Maryland, Delaware, and D.C.
Artist not stated in the record · July 1917

Post route map of New Jersey
Artist not stated in the record · 1917

Post route map of the Territory of Alaska
Artist not stated in the record · 1928

Letter to Rep. Nicholas Gilman from Postmaster General Timothy Pickering
Artist not stated in the record · October 16, 1792

World map with airmail routes
Artist not stated in the record · 1919-1950s

Airway route map of U.S.
Artist not stated in the record · 1935

Letter to US Representative from VT
Artist not stated in the record · 1863

Backlit Clouds
Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900 · July 1856

California and Southern Nevada postal route map
Artist not stated in the record · 1969
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 · 1 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.0 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1772449 matched · 40 examined · 9 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 16:00 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.