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 “Pinback button for the Harriet Tubman Home” — 40 records examined, 25 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 16:49 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 the Harriet Tubman Home
Artist not stated in the record · 1954

Matte collodion print of Harriet Tubman
Artist not stated in the record · 1871-1876; printed later

Brick from Harriet Tubman Home
Unidentified · 1880-1882

Carte-de-visite portrait of Harriet Tubman
Artist not stated in the record · 1868-1869

Pinback button advocating for Home Rule
Artist not stated in the record · before 1973

Pinback button for the Bed-Stuy neighborhood
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1964

Pinback Button, "Home Rule Charter, Yes!"
Artist not stated in the record · 1974

Newspaper clipping with a portrait of Harriet Tubman
John G. Darby, active 1830s - 1860s · ca. 1868; printed 1986

List of attendees of the launching of the S.S. Harriet Tubman
Artist not stated in the record · June 3, 1944

Harriet Tubman
John G. Darby, active 1830s - 1860s · c. 1868

Bottle used to christen the S.S. Harriet Tubman
Unidentified · June 3, 1944

Silk lace and linen shawl given to Harriet Tubman by Queen Victoria
Unidentified · ca. 1897
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. 1336661 matched · 40 examined · 25 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 2026-09-04 16:49 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.