With two official standards available for requesting an item, a rather confusing picture arises when planning the automation of interlibrary loan and document delivery facilities for libraries, commercial document suppliers, and patrons. Which standard should be implemented: the ILL Protocol or Z39.50 Extended Services for Item Order? There was substantial concern within the ISO community that Item Order was moving into a domain already covered by the ILL protocol standard and that these two standards would be competing. Even though there is an overlap in the functions these standards perform, they are unique and meet different operational requirements. In a distributed communications environment, they can be used to complement rather than compete with each other.