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. 14 shown for “Pony Express to Carson City, NV cover” — 42 records examined, 11 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:21 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
Georges Seurat · 1887–88
Pony Express to Carson City, NV cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1862
Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute: The Story of Lady Wenji
Unidentified artist · early 15th century
Express Cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1862
Pony Express patriotic cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1861
Eriogonum heermannii Durand & Hilg.
Artist not stated in the record · 30 Jul 2009
Poa secunda J. Presl
Artist not stated in the record · 30 Jul 2009
Pony Express Rider painting
Lloyd Branson, 1853 - 1925 · 1904
Pony Express San Francisco to New York cover
Artist not stated in the record · Aug 10, 1861
Replica of a Pony Express mochila
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1986
Nicotiana attenuata Torr. ex S. Watson in C. King
Artist not stated in the record · 3 Aug 2011
Lupinus sericeus Pursh
Artist not stated in the record · 15 May 2023
Purshia tridentata (Pursh) DC.
Artist not stated in the record · 15 May 2023
Poa secunda J. Presl
Artist not stated in the record · 6 May 2023
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. 1137269 matched · 40 examined · 11 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 01:21 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.