Hi John and Doug,

I’ve been following the thread and would like to offer an approach to Doug’s question of “how???”

There are two objectives at stake here:
- Increase submissions to the MoGH/chipguide - I am referring to casino collectibles more broadly, not just chips.
- Increase membership and participation in the club

One approach, as John mentioned, is via eBay. Here is an example message that one can send to an eBay seller who has listed a number of casino collectibles. I’m thinking not of the seller with a one-off item that he/she found at a garage sale, but one with multiple items that indicates this seller is or has been a collector:

Hi,

Sorry for the random message. I saw your listing for the [insert casino collectible]. I was wondering if you had submitted the images to the Museum of Gaming History. I’m a volunteer there and there's an non-profit online museum run by The Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club, Inc. (it’s the first result when you search on Google). If your casino items aren’t already in the museum (I just noticed that X item isn’t submitted already) you able to receive recognition in the Museum as the Contributor.

Also, within this community of casino collectors, you are welcome to post your eBay listings on the message board and you may have a better chance of selling your listings faster and at a higher price. I'd be happy to help if you were interested in submitting to the museum or sharing the listings on the message board.

Thanks,
Barry

For purposes of this ask, we might want to temporarily direct visitors of the MoGH website to the chipguide when the click on the logo in the center of the page. It is currently a broken link. MoGH website might be easier to navigate to than chipguide, assuming that eBay doesn’t permit direct links to external websites in their message system (Doug already noted this).

This type of dialogue can appeal to the eBay seller who a) wants recognition for their collection even after selling their item and b) the opportunity to engage with a community of like-minded individuals. This MAY lead to achieving both more submissions and increase membership to the club.

If you doubt my theory, allow me to offer a real-live example:
There is a seller named californiapapertrails. Check out this specific listing - [2947] Las Vegas Postcards - All Postally Used] (included in this post) which could be a treasure trove for the chipguide. Now, it’s unclear who would pay over $10k for his postcard collection, BUT it would be very special for ALL of us in the hobby to enjoy the content of his postcard collection via the chipguide. I reached out to him with almost my similar message above, offering my assistance to help contribute to the chipguide.

His response:

“Hello Barry. I wasn't familiar with the Chipguide museum so, no I haven't submitted any images of my collection to them. Thank you for your offer for assistance. I'm hoping to sell this collection to someone or some organization that will appreciate its content and wealth of historical first hand impressions of the senders of the postcards. I made it a point to only collect postally used cards for that reason. Hope to hear back from you. Take care, David.”

And

“Hello Barry. I'd be happy to have my collection digitized. Would you be wanting to do so with every postcard in the collection, front & back [for the sender messages] or would you wish to capture only the unique ones? There are many duplicate images obviously as my aim was to collect any and all that were postally used for the messages and the senders' impressions of this fabulous era of Las Vegas history. Either way, you're welcome to come down to Cayucos to do so. Let me know and thanks again,
David”

I live in Northern California and have not been able to travel down to Cayucos to help him digitize his collection and upload to chipguide or thechipboard. If anyone lives closer, the opportunity is still there.

In summary, I do think there is an opportunity to send a standard message to the many eBay sellers of casino collectibles to inform them of the chipguide and the club. I think you’d be pleasantly surprised by the reaction. No, one doesn’t have to manually review eBay listings for items not in the chipguide. I think the key is identifying sellers who might be willing to share there collections with us and could lead to future membership. I'm happy to refine the crafting of the standard message as my contribution to this effort. Also, as a chipguide Admin, I'm happy to help upload non-chip submissions. I appreciate you reading my *first* post as a returning CCGTCC member.

Thanks,
Barry
R-9089