Titanic and the ravages of time

This morning’s brief NYT article about the death of one of the last known survivors of the Titanic made me pause for a moment. Not because I’m a Titanic buff (I’m not,though I do find the story to be fascinating),but because of the mention that the deceased was one of the last two survivors of that fateful journey,a representative of the past. As time marches onward,memories fade and we begin to lose more and more “eyewitnesses”to history. Within my lifetime,the last Holocaust survivor,the last soldier present on D-Day,and others will slowly go “into that good night.”I’m not ready for that to happen yet. As an archivist charged with preserving history,I feel that I am always looking for ways to stave off a time when firsthand accounts are no longer available in the flesh. Of course oral histories look to fill that gap,but are there other things that we can do as keepers of the record to preserve the immediacy of speaking with someone who was there at Normandy? How can we,without overinterpreting or overemphasizing,better bring an accurate sense of the past to the present? What are the best ways to capture these things now,before the opportunity is lost?