Deciding factors: Issues that influence decision-making on significant properties

Significant Properties (SPs) have been in the digital preservation literature for a decade or more. There has been widespread agreement on the important role they play, but no consensus on exactly what is significant.Investigating the Significant Properties of Electronic Content over Time (InSPECT) aimed to expand and articulate the concept of ‘significant properties’, determine sets of significant properties for a specified group of digital object types, evaluate methods for measuring these properties for a sample of relevant representation formats, investigate and test the mapping and comparison of these properties between different representation formats, and identify any issues requiring further research.This discussion paper represents an early attempt to identify the factors that contribute to the evaluation of significant properties.