Prioritisation requires rules to be defined by analysing both the business and technical requirements. The business and technical factors cannot be treated independently. For example, one part of the archive might have a high business value, but actually be given a low priority for digitisation since the carriers are not in danger of decay and there are still playback machines in production so there is not a risk of loosing access. On the other hand, another part of the archive might have moderate business value, but the carriers are rapidly decaying and hence transfer is urgent to avoid widespread loss.

Priority is typically governed by properties such as content, genre, usage, carrier type and condition.