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This article reports the preliminary findings of a study on a scattering of journals and obsolescence based on 2-years' worth of empirical data obtained from a national document delivery service. The distribution of article requests to journal titles confirmed the findings of earlier studies. Heavily used core journal titles satisfied large numbers of document delivery requests while large numbers of infrequently used titles satisfied relatively fewer numbers of requests. Half the requests were made to articles of 8 years of age or younger. It takes slightly longer for core journal titles to get obsolete. The frequency of journal use for document delivery purposes was not related to ISI journal impact factors or citation half-lives, although a weak negative correlation was found between impact factors and citation half-lives. Median use age of journals was not related to impact factors either. A weak correlation was observed between frequency of use and total citation counts and between citation half-life and use half-life of core journals.