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 “Reconstruction of a Foundation Deposit” — 40 records examined, 27 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-26 20:19 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

1c Franklin on Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · May 25, 1861

Photograph of postal employees in the Postal Savings Office, New York City
Artist not stated in the record · October 13, 1914

Bull's eye cancellation handstamp
Artist not stated in the record · 1870-1940

Yellowstone, Hot Springs
Thomas Moran, American, b. Britain, 1837–1926 · July 21, 1892

Photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt mailing letter in a bus
Artist not stated in the record · 1941

EET 90007,11
Artist not stated in the record · 1990

Personnel action warning form
Artist not stated in the record · 1863

The Descent from the Cross (The Deposition), from The Little Passion Series
Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528 · 1509–11

July 4, 1776 John Hancock cover
Artist not stated in the record · July 4, 1776

EET 90022,4
Artist not stated in the record · 1990

EET 90004,4
Artist not stated in the record · 1990

EET 90007,5
Artist not stated in the record · 1990
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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3853481 matched · 40 examined · 27 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 2026-08-26 20:19 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.