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. 12 shown for “Tolypothrix distorta var. symplocoides Hansg.” — 40 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-10 20:36 UTC · fetched live 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.
Tolypothrix distorta var. symplocoides Hansg.

Tolypothrix distorta var. symplocoides Hansg.

Artist not stated in the record · Jul 1886

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Lyngbya lateritia var. symplocoides Hansg.

Lyngbya lateritia var. symplocoides Hansg.

Artist not stated in the record · Aug 1887

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Tolypothrix distorta var. samoensis N.Wille

Tolypothrix distorta var. samoensis N.Wille

Artist not stated in the record · Jul 1905

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Tolypothrix penicillata var. tenuis Hansg.

Tolypothrix penicillata var. tenuis Hansg.

Artist not stated in the record · Aug 1889

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Tolypothrix distorta Kütz.

Tolypothrix distorta Kütz.

Artist not stated in the record

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Tolypothrix rivularis Hansg.

Tolypothrix rivularis Hansg.

Artist not stated in the record · Sep 1890

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Tolypothrix distorta f. tenuior Rabenh.

Tolypothrix distorta f. tenuior Rabenh.

Artist not stated in the record · Apr 1859

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Plectonema kirchneri Cooke

Plectonema kirchneri Cooke

Artist not stated in the record · 1882

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Artist not stated in the record · 1918 to 1920

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Artist not stated in the record · 19 Jan 1922

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Artist not stated in the record · 1918 to 1920

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Laplacea fruticosa var. symplocoides (Triana & Planch.) Kobuski

Artist not stated in the record · 20 Mar 1940

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 225349 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-09-10 20:36 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.