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. 9 shown for “Photographic postcard of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor” — 21 records examined, 12 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-30 09:54 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Christabel
Julia Margaret Cameron · 1866

Photographic postcard of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1905

L'Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Marie Julien, 1848–1911)
Vincent van Gogh · 1888–89

The Song of Hiawatha Op.30
Artist not stated in the record · 1900

Hermia and Helena
Washington Allston, born Georgetown, SC 1779-died Cambridgeport, MA 1843 · before 1818

Photograph of postcard of rural carrier's Christmas
Artist not stated in the record · 1915

Tom N. Wills of Arizona, a Great Roaper
Artist not stated in the record · 1907-1909

Composite Group Portrait of Touring Lecturers for the American Literary Bureau
American Literary Bureau · 1868

Anti-Slavery Constitutional Amendment Picture
Powell & Co. · 1865
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. 2 matched · 2 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.2 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 19 matched · 19 examined · 12 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.7 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-30 09:54 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.