Pre-Cats

A brief overview of the steps through which materials in our libraries collections get fully processed in the SWAN bibliographic catalog.

As streaming services prioritize digital content to attract and retain customers, the availability of popular shows and movies in physical formats like Blu-Ray and DVD has declined. This shift has spurred an increase in counterfeit products sold by third-party vendors on platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. This page will assist you in preventing the acquisition of these materials, identifying pirated materials in-hand, knowing how to respond if an item is found to be pirated, and additional resources available to you in these efforts.

SWAN uses brief bibliographic records, or pre-cats, to provide patron access to materials lacking full catalog records. Pre-cat records contain the minimum fields to distinguish a resource from any other. You may create a pre-cat record regardless of your library’s cataloging status. Only OCLC Cataloging Libraries and SWAN staff may overlay pre-cat records with full cataloging.

Audiovisual materials require extra care to avoid duplicate records. Because of the diversity of formats (Blu-Ray, DVD, Combo Pack, 4K Blu-ray, and others) we recommend searching by UPC/ISBN and title, before entering a pre-cat.      

Use SWAN pre-cat templates to optimize data entry of hand-keyed pre-cats. The templates can be copied using the Duplicate Title wizard.  Never use the Duplicate Title Wizard to copy full records.  

This is a reference page of pre-cat examples. 

The same core requirements for an English language material pre-cat applies to pre-cats for foreign language materials. See Creating a Pre-cat on the support site.