OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

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. 16 shown for “String of 5 Eyed Beads” — 64 records examined, 36 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-29 00:31 UTC · served from cache, not re-queried for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.
String of 5 eyed beads

String of 5 eyed beads

Artist not stated in the record · 525–332 BCE ?

Public domainThe Met
String of large coral beads, by Unidentified

String of large coral beads

Unidentified · 1800-1968

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 5 Eyed Beads

String of 5 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 12th century CE (?)

Public domainThe Met
String of small coral beads, by Unidentified

String of small coral beads

Unidentified · 1800-1968

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 5 Eyed Beads

String of 5 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · 600–1000 CE

Public domainThe Met
Cobalt blue European glass trade beads, by Unidentified

Cobalt blue European glass trade beads

Unidentified · ca. 17th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 5 Eyed Beads

String of 5 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · mid-10th–late 8th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Basket with Decorative Beading, by Ira Blount

Basket with Decorative Beading

Ira Blount · late 20th-early 21st Century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 7 Eyed Beads

String of 7 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · 1st millennium BCE–1st millennium CE

Public domainThe Met
Venetian glass trade beads, by Unidentified

Venetian glass trade beads

Unidentified · 18th to 20th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 4 Eyed Beads

String of 4 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1200–1080 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Venetian glass trade beads, by Unidentified

Venetian glass trade beads

Unidentified · ca. 16th or 17th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Venetian glass trade beads, by Unidentified

Venetian glass trade beads

Unidentified · ca. 16th or 17th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
String of 27 Eyed Beads

String of 27 Eyed Beads

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1st–mid 4th century CE or later

Public domainThe Met
String of 5 Beads

String of 5 Beads

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 200 BCE–CE 100

Public domainThe Met
String of 5 Beads

String of 5 Beads

Artist not stated in the record · 4th century CE

Public domainThe Met
What was queried

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. 527 matched · 24 examined · 3 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. 3113758 matched · 40 examined · 33 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.7 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-29 00:31 UTC, replayed here rather than repeated. 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.