Catalogue & reporting an issue

How the shared toy catalogue works, where records come from, and how to fix a wrong one.

One shared catalogue

Every library draws from the same shared toy catalogue, so a toy is described once and its safety information is shared. Records come from several places, shown by a provenance badge:

AI · not reviewed — auto-generated from a photo, not yet human-checked.
AI · reviewed / Staff-curated — checked by our team.
Library-contributed — added by a member library.

Not every toy is in it, and that is fine: a record your library alone holds is library-only, and it lends, counts and prints labels exactly like a shared one. See Library-only and shared-catalogue toys for what each state does.

Improving a record

You can edit a library-only toy directly — nobody else reads that record, so your change is simply your change.

A shared-catalogue toy is one record that every library holding that toy reads, so a fix goes to the catalogue team — platform staff and approved community moderators — as a correction they review before it lands. (A moderator never decides a proposal from their own library.)

Once a curator decides, the toy's Catalogue section shows the outcome and you get a dashboard notification. If the changes weren't accepted you'll see Not accepted — with the curator's short reason when they left one — and your toy carries on lending exactly as before. You can revise and send again at any time.

When the catalogue team changes a toy you hold

Improvements to a shared record reach you straight away — a better description or a corrected age range is the point of a shared catalogue, and nothing waits on your approval. Inventory → Catalogue updates is the list of what changed on toys you hold, newest first, one card per edit, and the dashboard says how many you haven't looked at yet.

Reading the page is the whole job for almost every card: keeping a change means doing nothing, and the dashboard count clears just by visiting. There is no accept button because there is nothing to accept.

When an edit is wrong for your copies — the catalogue says 3+ and the box in your hands says 18 months — tick that field and Reject selected. Your library goes back to the old value and keeps it; every other library carries on with the catalogue's. Nothing forks: the toy stays on the shared record, so photos and holds are unaffected, and the toy page shows the field as one your library overrides (with Reset all if you change your mind). The optional one-line note goes to the catalogue team, who read the rejections as a worklist — it is how they find out an edit was wrong.

Two things worth knowing. Rejecting a piece list change keeps the list as it stands now as your library's own, rather than restoring the old one — edit it on the toy page from there. And if the catalogue later edits a field you already override, it comes back as a new card marked you override this: your value is untouched, and you are only being told the catalogue moved underneath it.

Safety warnings work the other way round. You cannot reject or remove a warning the catalogue carries — disagreeing with one is a suggestion to the catalogue team, from the toy's Catalogue tab. What you can do is add one for your own copies: the Your library's warnings row on that tab lists the warning types the catalogue does not already carry, and a tick there shows on the toy's page and prints on its label for your library only. It never blocks a loan; only the catalogue's own warnings do that.

Adding a library-only toy to the catalogue

Search first. On a library-only toy, Find this toy in the catalogue opens a two-step search, and it starts with the manufacturer — getting the maker right is what makes a name search work at all, and it is the one thing you can usually read off the box. Type it and we say whether we know that maker, offer the nearest spellings if we half-know it ("Did you mean MagBlox?"), or tell you plainly that we have nothing from them yet. If you genuinely don't know the maker, say so and the search widens to every maker by name.

Step two is the name, within that maker, pre-filled from your toy's name with your own suffixes removed ("(Set 2)", "#3"). Leave it blank to list everything that maker makes. Results come as the same cards the match queue uses: shared catalogue records you can Compare and Link, and supplier products you can Add & link in one step. Linking inherits the record's photos and pieces.

None of these match? At the bottom of the results — and only there — is the option to add your toy as a new entry for review. Check the name and the manufacturer on your own record first: most duplicates are a toy that was in the catalogue all along under a spelling the search never saw.

Linked to the wrong record?

It happens — two versions of the same game, a boxed set and its refill, a name that reads the same on both. Under the catalogue details on a linked toy, Unlink and search again walks it back out.

The toy becomes library-only again, on a fresh record holding a copy of the details you were reading — name, maker, description, ages, players — with anything you keep your own way already applied. Your piece list and its check history come with it, so nothing you have recorded missing or found is lost, and photos you added come back too (photos you have shared to the catalogue stay on the shared record, where you put them). Safety warnings your library added itself — including any that came across from your old system when you linked — come back with it. Barcodes and the catalogue's own safety warnings do not: they were the catalogue's claims about a product you have just said this toy is not.

Nothing is deleted and no other library is affected — the shared record carries on exactly as it was, and if you hold other copies of it, they stay linked. The search opens straight afterwards so you can pick the right record, and the one you just left will not be suggested again for this toy.

Matching imported toys

Toys brought in by an import start as library-only records, and Match toys to the catalogue (under Inventory) suggests shared entries they might be. Each card shows your copy's own maker beside the suggestion's, and either photo opens full size on a tap; Compare puts the two records — piece lists included — side by side. If a suggestion is wrong, Not the same rules out just that candidate, in place: the next-best match takes its place on the same card. Search the catalogue on any row opens the same manufacturer-first search the toy page offers, for when the suggestions are all wrong — and on a row with no suggestions at all, that search is where adding the toy as new now lives. Keep library-only sets the whole toy aside instead. Proposing piece or detail improvements to a shared record happens from the toy's own page after linking — the full-record page only takes issue reports.

Linking does not touch your piece lists. An imported toy keeps counting against the list that came across with it, printed bag labels and all — linking gives the copy the shared record's name, photos and description, and leaves the contents alone. That means there is nothing to decide about pieces here, and nothing to re-count or re-print afterwards. See Piece lists & counting for what to do later, if and when you want the catalogue's list instead.

Your lists also help fill the catalogue in. When you link to a shared record that has no piece list at all and no other library holds it, your list is copied onto it as a contribution — hand-counted contents being far better evidence than anything we could guess. It is copied exactly as you have it, at your level of detail; nobody invents a finer breakdown on your behalf.

Because the queue no longer changes anything operational, it is not a job that has to be finished before you can open. Work it in sittings, or leave it — every toy lends, counts and prints labels whether it is linked or not.

Suggesting a correction to a toy you don't hold

You don't have to own a toy to fix its record. On a shared record's public page — /catalog/…, the page a label's QR code opens — signed-in staff with catalogue edit permission see Suggest a correction alongside Report an issue. It sends the actual values rather than a description of the problem, so a curator can accept them field by field instead of working out what you meant.

A few deliberate limits:

Four things are editable here: description, recommended age, number of players, and the link to the manual. Names, manufacturers, box contents, photos and safety warnings are not — those are identity and safety facts that need someone holding the physical toy. Use Report an issue for them.
If your library holds the toy, you'll be pointed at your inventory instead: editing there gives you the corrected record for your own shelves and sends the change for review.
You'll see the control only on your own library's site, not on the public toyhive.app catalogue, since a suggestion is recorded as coming from your library.
There's a cap on how many suggestions can be waiting on one record, and on how many your library can have in flight at once. Both clear as the catalogue team works through them.

Your suggestion joins the same queue as a correction sent by a library that holds the toy, and you're told the outcome the same way. Adding a short note — "the box says 3+" — is the single most useful thing you can do for whoever reviews it.

Reporting an issue

For a quick "this is wrong" — a bad photo, wrong age, a duplicate — use Report an issue on the toy, or the Flag button on a specific photo. It goes to a curator's review queue rather than changing the record directly, so anyone can flag a problem safely. Photo deletion always routes through this review, never a direct delete.