OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
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. 12 shown for “Photograph of Army pilot Lt. Torrey Webb on first day of airmail service” — 40 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-01 15:43 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.
Photograph of Army pilot Lt. Torrey Webb on first day of airmail service

Photograph of Army pilot Lt. Torrey Webb on first day of airmail service

Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilot Lt. Torrey Webb and NYC Postmaster Thomas G. Patten

Photograph of airmail pilot Lt. Torrey Webb and NYC Postmaster Thomas G. Patten

Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail plane wreckage

Photograph of airmail plane wreckage

Artist not stated in the record · 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Curtiss JN-4H model

Curtiss JN-4H model

Artist not stated in the record · 1918-1919

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilot Lt. James Edgerton and sister

Photograph of airmail pilot Lt. James Edgerton and sister

Artist not stated in the record · May 18, 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of Army Air Corps pilots Maj. Reuben Fleet and Lt. George Boyle

Photograph of Army Air Corps pilots Maj. Reuben Fleet and Lt. George Boyle

Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Curtiss JN-4H model

Curtiss JN-4H model

Artist not stated in the record · 1918-1919

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilot Edward Killgore

Photograph of airmail pilot Edward Killgore

Artist not stated in the record · 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Flight report by pilot James Edgerton

Flight report by pilot James Edgerton

Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins and bag of first overnight airmail

Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins and bag of first overnight airmail

Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilot Arthur Roy Smith

Photograph of airmail pilot Arthur Roy Smith

Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Photograph of airmail pilots Edison Mouton and Rexford Levisee

Photograph of airmail pilots Edison Mouton and Rexford Levisee

Artist not stated in the record · c. 1921

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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3066614 matched · 40 examined · 1 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 15:43 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.