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. 15 shown for “One of a Pair of Scrimshaw Sperm Whale’s Teeth, late 19th Century” — 51 records examined, 36 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 07:40 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
'Otua fefine (deity figure)
Ha'apai Islands artist · Early 19th century

One of a Pair of Scrimshaw Sperm Whale’s Teeth, late 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record · late 19th century

Archangel Gabriel; The Virgin Annunciate
Gerard David · ca. 1510

One of a Pair of Scrimshaw Sperm Whale’s Teeth, late 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record

Whalers
Joseph Mallord William Turner · ca. 1845

Scrimshaw Sperm Whale’s Tooth, Mid-19th Century
Artist not stated in the record

The Disillusioned Medea
Paulus Bor · ca. 1640

Scrimshaw Sperm Whale’s Tooth, Mid-19th Century
Artist not stated in the record

Damascus Room
Artist not stated in the record · dated 1119 AH/1707 CE

Scrimshaw Sperm Whale Tooth, mid-late 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record · 1850 - 1900

Lion Ornament
Asante-Akan artist · 19th century

Sperm Whale Tooth Prepared for Scrimshaw, 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record

Lion Ornament
Asante-Akan artist · 19th century

Scrimshaw Sperm Whale Tooth, mid 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record · mid 19th century

Scrimshaw Sperm Whale Tooth, mid 19th Century
Artist not stated in the record · mid 19th century
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. 11 matched · 11 examined · 4 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.7 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3981681 matched · 40 examined · 32 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.8 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-04 07:40 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.