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 “U.S. War Department” — 64 records examined, 50 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 13:37 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.War Hat
Artist not stated in the record · 1450–1500
![[Operation Crossroads: 21 Kiloton "Baker" Bomb Detonated Ninety Feet Underwater, Bikini Atoll Lagoon, South Pacific, July 25, 1946], by U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.metmuseum.org%2FCRDImages%2Fph%2Fweb-large%2FDP-22644-003.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
[Operation Crossroads: 21 Kiloton "Baker" Bomb Detonated Ninety Feet Underwater, Bikini Atoll Lagoon, South Pacific, July 25, 1946]
U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps · 1946

Assault on Arnhem
U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps · September 17, 1944

Der aller durchleuchtigisten und grosmächtigen Kayser ... Königen ... Herren vom Adel ... Bildtnussen und kurtz Beschreibungen ihrer so wol in Fridts- als Kriegszzeiten verrichten fürnembsten Thaten und Handlungen : deren Waffen und Rüstungen ... auss allen Landen der Welt ... in dem Schloss Ombrass ... zu ewiger Gedächtnuss auffbehalten werden ...
Jacob Schrenck von Nozing · 1603

U.S. Transport "Wau Katchie"
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Monitor "Saugus"
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Monitor Onondaga, James River
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Monitor Onondaga, James River
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Ship "Mendota", James River
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Gunboat at Kingston Gap
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Monitor Lehigh, James River
Unknown · 1861–65

U.S. Monitor Lehigh, James River
Unknown · 1861–65
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. 1280 matched · 24 examined · 10 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. 532413 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 13:37 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.