ToyHive
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Toy recommendations

Turn the platform's rating and borrowing data into gentle nudges — for members choosing what to borrow next, and for your library deciding what to buy or retire. All heuristics, no black box.

Turning recommendations on

Recommendations are off by default. Turn them on in Settings → Loans → Toy recommendations. The two member-facing shelves appear only while the setting is on; the staff Toy insights report works regardless.

For members (needs the setting on)

  • "Recommended for you" — a shelf at the top of the catalogue for signed-in members. It ranks the library's available toys the household hasn't borrowed yet, blending:
    • the toy's platform-wide star rating,
    • a bonus when the toy's age range fits one of the household's children, and
    • a bonus when it's often borrowed alongside a toy the family already borrowed or rated highly.
  • "Families who borrowed this also borrowed …" — a strip on each toy page listing co-borrowed toys that are available in your library.

For staff (always available)

The Toy insights report (under Reports) has three review-driven lists — Hidden gems (loved but under-borrowed), At risk (poorly rated or "wouldn't borrow again"), and Top rated — plus an acquisition & retirement advisor:

  • Buy this — toys many other libraries hold and their members rate highly, that you don't have yet.
  • Buy another copy — your well-liked toys with lots of recent holds (demand you're missing).
  • Retire or refresh — your poorly-received, rarely-borrowed toys.

Birthday and age-group emails

The same shelf, sent instead of waited for. With recommendations on, two emails become available under Settings → Notifications → Family:

  • A child's birthday — three days before their birthday month starts, so there is time to come in. ToyHive keeps a child's birth month and year, never the day, so the email names the month: "Leo is turning 3 in October — here's what's on our shelf right now made for 3-year-olds", plus anything that fits him that is out with another family and could be put on hold.
  • A child moved up an age group — the same list, on the day a different part of the shelf opens up for them rather than on the day they were born.

Four things all have to be true before one is sent, which is why a library that switches them on may see very few at first:

  1. the trigger is on for your library (both are, once you enable them);
  2. the family has email on, and a current membership;
  3. the family has not turned off "Emails about your children" in their member account; and
  4. there are at least three suitable toys available. Below that nothing is sent — an almost-empty shelf reads as "we have nothing for your child", which is worse than no email.

That last rule doubles as a stock signal: if a birthday email is being skipped every month for 6–8s, that is the age group your shelf is thin on.

ToyHive never stores a child's date of birth, only the month and year, and that is encrypted: the nightly job decrypts it in memory to work out whether today is the day, uses it, and throws it away. No column holds a child's birth month in plain text, and nothing stores their age or age group.

One honest caveat, because it is the kind of thing a committee should know rather than discover: the email itself is a record. Like every notification ToyHive sends, it is stored so you can see what went out — and a birthday email says a first name, an age and a birth month. So the sent mail states what the database only holds encrypted. ToyHive hides the subject and body of these two emails in Settings → Notifications → History for that reason; the delivery record (who, when, did it arrive) stays visible.

Privacy

Recommendations for a family are computed inside your library. The only cross-library inputs are platform-wide aggregates (average ratings, holdings counts, and anonymous "borrowed-together" counts) — never any other family's identity. There is no "your neighbours borrowed X" phrasing; it's platform-scale counts only.