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. 9 shown for “Space Technology Laboratories (STL)” — 40 records examined, 31 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-03 06:25 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Rocket Engine, Liquid Fuel, Apollo Lunar Module Descent Engine
Space Technology Laboratories (STL) · 1966

Instrument package, Satellite, Pioneer IV
Space Technology Laboratories (STL)

Sphagnum lescurii Sull.
Artist not stated in the record · 12 Mar 1976

Satellite, Pioneer I, Reconstructed Replica
TRW Space & Technology Group

Sphagnum perichaetiale Hampe
Artist not stated in the record · 11 Apr 1976

Rocket, Liquid Fuel, Sounding, WAC Corporal
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology · ca. 1945-1950

Hall of Physical Sciences, Museum of History and Technology - Chemistry Laboratory, 1890
Smithsonian Institution Photographic Services Division · 1966

Hall of Physical Sciences, Museum of History and Technology - Chemistry Laboratory, 1790
Smithsonian Institution Photographic Services Division · 1966

Thomas Edison
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, 1860 - 1935 · 1890
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. 25191 matched · 40 examined · 31 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.9 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-03 06:25 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.