This presentation was presented during the PERICLES workshop entitled “automated capture of the environment in a sheer curation context”, which took place at the 10th International Digital Curation Conference on the 11 Feb 2015 in London, UK. Simon Waddington (King’s College London) provided an outline of the objectives of the recently started investigation into appraisal. As there exist a number of definitions of appraisal, such as “identifying digital objects of continuing business value”, the question of relevant appraisal criteria and their evaluation was raised, motivated by examples from the PERICLES science and media case studies.