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. 14 shown for “Print of Cab Calloway conducting his band” — 43 records examined, 26 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-03 05:03 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Sprite
Donatello · 1432

Print of Cab Calloway conducting his band with a large audience visible
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

The Stalled Procession
Claude Gillot

Print of Cab Calloway conducting his band
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

Photographic print of Cab Calloway and his band in a sleeper car
Artist not stated in the record · 1933

Print of Cab Calloway with his band and dancers from the movie The Singing Kid
Artist not stated in the record · 1936; printed 1970s

Print of Cab Calloway and his band performing on stage
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

Print of Cab Calloway in checked suit standing in front of microphone
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

Print of Cab Calloway dancing at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s

Print of Cab Calloway looking out a window
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s - 1960s

Poster for Ebony Parade
Artist not stated in the record · 1947

Print of Cab Calloway dancing at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s

Print of Cab Calloway and dancers performing
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

Transit pass for St. Louis Public Service Company depicting Cab Calloway
St. Louis Public Service Company, American, 1927 - 1966 · April 1944
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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 1 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. 2871591 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 2026-09-03 05:03 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.