Why did the BL archive Wendy Cope's emails?

Wired.co.uk spoke to two of the British Library team working on that project -- Modern Literary Manuscripts curator, Rachel Foss, and Jeremy Leighton John, e-Manuscripts curator, to discuss the benefits and difficulties of capturing an author's digital life and what researchers of the future will have to root through [...]

He explains: "Digital preservation is about things like being able to read file systems and physical media. It's a question of how to read particular files in the future. Future-proofing formats is a big challenge."

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/british-library-digital-archives