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. 23 shown for “Steelyard Rod with Weight and Hooks” — 64 records examined, 33 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 03:09 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Steelyard Rod with Weight and Hooks
Artist not stated in the record · 5th–7th century

Cotton scale with weight
Artist not stated in the record · mid 19th-mid 20th century

Steelyard Weight with a Bust of a Byzantine Empress and a Hook
Artist not stated in the record · 400–450

Weight hanger
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1900-1980

Steelyard Weight with the Bust of Athena
Artist not stated in the record · 350–500

Cotton scale used in South Carolina
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1900

Bronze steelyard and weights
Artist not stated in the record · 4th–6th century CE

Steelyard
Artist not stated in the record · 1840

Steelyard Weight with the Bust of a Woman
Artist not stated in the record · 4th century

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Weight in the Shape of a Byzantine Empress
Artist not stated in the record · 5th century

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Glass weight
Artist not stated in the record · 1st century CE or later

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1900-1980

Perseus with the Head of Medusa
Antonio Canova · 1804–6

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Longcase astronomical regulator
Ferdinand Berthoud · ca. 1768–70

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Longcase clock with calendar
Joseph Knibb · ca. 1680–85

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Collar Pendant
Artist not stated in the record · late 5th–early 6th century

Weight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1930

Head of Medusa
Antonio Canova · 1806–7
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. 48 matched · 24 examined · 4 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1753012 matched · 40 examined · 29 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.11 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-28 03:09 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.