OpenTwo 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 postal clerk sorting airmail” — 41 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 15:54 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Photograph of postal clerk sorting airmail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920
Photograph of Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson
Artist not stated in the record · 1918
Photograph of postal clerks sorting mail
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1890
Photograph of Railway Post Office clerks at work
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930
Photograph of Highway Post Office clerks at work on bus
Artist not stated in the record · 1941
Photograph of Railway Post Office clerks at work
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920
Photograph of Railway Mail Service clerks in Kansas City, Missouri
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1910
Photograph of postal clerks transferring mail sacks
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920
Mite postal scale
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1953
Sasebo, Japan Occupation cachet airmail cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1945
Photograph of interior of Trans World Airline (TWA) Skymaster
Artist not stated in the record · September 26, 1946
Photograph of post card of mail car in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Artist not stated in the record · 1907
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. 2899736 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 15:54 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.