Librarians in academic libraries face many problems when attempting to make cost effective provision of recommended reading for students. Moreover, the diversity of academic institutions and academic disciplines impedes comparison between libraries. However, within a single institution, quality of provision can be monitored by the use of internal comparisons. Reviews measures of performance and patterns of student activity and assesses the provision of recommended reading for two groups of undergraduate students enrolled on similar courses by comparing their recorded utilization of short-loan books. The assessment is corroborat ed with statistics of use, distributions of user activity and the results of a user survey. By comparing perfor mance indicators for the utilization of the collection by these two groups of students with similar library require ments, systematic differences in the provision and uptake of recomm ended titles are distinguished from the general unevenness in demand which is common to both groups and well known in libraries.
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