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 promoting African Liberation Day” — 40 records examined, 22 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-02 22:18 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 promoting African Liberation Day
Artist not stated in the record · 1977

Pinback button promoting African Liberation Day
Artist not stated in the record · 1977

Pinback button promoting Martin Luther King Day
Artist not stated in the record · 1982

Pinback button supporting African Liberation
Artist not stated in the record · October 1973

Pinback button promoting public housing in New York City
Artist not stated in the record · late 20th century

Pinback button for Herman B. Ferfuson's campaign for Senate
Artist not stated in the record · 1968

Pinback button for Black Solidarity Day
Artist not stated in the record · after 1969

Pinback button promoting My Name Is Jermaine album
Unidentified · 1976

Pinback Button, "Can't Wait To Punch 8"
Artist not stated in the record · 1982

Pinback button for promoting voting registration
Artist not stated in the record · 1970s

Pinback button promoting black unity
Artist not stated in the record · mid 20th century

Pinback button promoting black unity
Artist not stated in the record · mid 20th century
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. 88643 matched · 40 examined · 22 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 2026-09-02 22:18 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.