In this article, we examine the similarities between the concept of appraisal, a process that takes place within the archives, and the concept of relevance judgement, a process fundamental to information retrieval systems. More specifically, we revisit appraisal/selection criteria proposed as a result of archival and digital curation communities, and, compare them to relevance criteria as discussed within information retrieval's literature based discovery. We illustrate how closely these criteria relate to each other and discuss how understanding the relationships between the these disciplines could form a basis for proposing automated appraisal and selection for archival processes and enabling complex queries within information retrieval.