Strangely enough, there are people who collect crowncaps. Someone says "corks", so it's wrong, we don't do that. They mostly collect beer caps, but there are other interests. Someone started as a child, then matured, but didn't stop collecting. Today, collections are grow through changes with others, there's a competition for rarities, and sometimes they even buy rare specimens for lots of money. Catalogs are needed to organize collections.
During Soviet times, beverages were produced in glass containers with various types of sealing: foil for milk, "peakless caps" for spirits, plastic and cork for champagne, and so on. But we're interested in the crowncap strong steel or aluminum, usually with 21 teeth. The USSR produced many variations of crowncaps, sometimes barely distinguishable from one another to the naked eye. And while there's plenty of information on modern caps on the internet, there's almost nothing about Soviet caps.
This project was conceived to understand this diversity. Soviet caps have long been out of production—that's the difficulty, and we (the catalog editors) delve into their history to understand the artifact's origins, when it was produced, and how it relates to other similar artifacts. Crowncaps are often literally dug out of the ground, found in old attics and garages. So, are we, in a sense, archaeologists? The condition of such finds isn't always perfect; they have to be restored, so we're also restorers🙂
Besides collectors, there are metal detectorists who come across bottle caps. They might also find the information in the catalog useful.
