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. 11 shown for “Pinback button for Kennedy - Johnson 1960 presidential campaign” — 40 records examined, 29 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 13:19 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Pinback button for Kennedy - Johnson 1960 presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1960

Pinback button for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1968

Pinback button for the Robert Kennedy campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1968

Folding tab button for Kennedy - Johnson 1960 presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1960

Pinback button reading "Blacks for McGovern"
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1972

Pinback button for Channing Phillips' presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1968

Pinback button for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1984

Pinback button for Clinton presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1992-1996

Pinback button for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign
Artist not stated in the record · 1988

Pinback Button, "Humphrey Muskie"
Artist not stated in the record · 1968

Pinback Button, "The Platform"
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1976
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. 1227750 matched · 40 examined · 29 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.11 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 13:19 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.