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 “Nurse's uniform dress worn by Pauline Brown Payne” — 40 records examined, 11 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-10 14:37 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Nurse's uniform dress worn by Pauline Brown Payne
Artist not stated in the record · 1944

Nurse's uniform apron worn by Pauline Brown Payne
Artist not stated in the record · 1944

Nurse's cap worn by Pauline Brown Payne
Artist not stated in the record · 1944

Pair of nurse's shoes worn by Pauline Brown Payne
Artist not stated in the record · 1944

Women's US Army Service uniform worn by Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown
Sugarman Uniforms, American · 1980

Women's US Army Service skirt worn by Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown
Sugarman Uniforms, American · 1980

Women's US Army Service jacket worn by Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown
Sugarman Uniforms, American · 1980

Women's US Army Service beret worn by Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown
Custom Hat Corporation, American · 1980

Women's US Army Service hat worn by Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown
Sam Bonk Uniform and Civilian Cap Company, American, founded 1963 · 1980

Button from Army Nurse Corps uniform worn by Lt. Louise Lomax
Artist not stated in the record · 1943-1953

Button from Army Nurse Corps uniform worn by Lt. Louise Lomax
Artist not stated in the record · 1943-1953

Button from Army Nurse Corps uniform worn by Lt. Louise Lomax
Artist not stated in the record · 1943-1953
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. 591209 matched · 40 examined · 11 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 2026-09-10 14:37 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.