For more than 40 years, the librarians and information specialists at NARIC have developed or published a host of resources to connect people with disabilities, practitioners, researchers, caregivers, and advocates to information and research on disability and rehabilitation. Today we’d like to introduce or reintroduce you to some of these resources. We’ll help you browse, explore, and dig deeper into our consumer resources and literature collection, and show you how to get to know more about the NIDILRR grantee community and what they produce.
Connecting to Disability and Rehabilitation Resources
We’ve developed several information resources to help people with disabilities, caregivers, advocates, and others connect to agencies, organization, and online resources. These include support and advocacy organizations, publishers, Federal agencies, and more.
Browse: NARIC’s Librarians Picks feature carefully selected resources on 18 different topics including spinal cord injury, employment, education, assistive technology, traumatic brain injury, and others. Each Librarians Pick includes government agencies and institutes, long-standing nonprofit and advocacy organizations, and trusted Internet sources. Topics were selected based on frequent requests received through our toll-free information line, email, chat, and social media. Each Librarians Pick is available in English and Spanish and can be downloaded in PDF format for easy printing and sharing.
Explore: In the “olden days,” NARIC’s library had a “Ready Reference” shelf full of dictionaries, directories, and other reference volumes to answer questions and direct callers onward to find more information. Today, we have the Disability Resources section at naric.com. The resources are divided into more than 20 general areas, with subtopics in each. Like the Librarians Picks, each item is carefully selected from reputable sources.
Dig Deeper: NARIC’s Knowledgebase is our searchable database of disability and rehabilitation resources. It represents more than 30 years of curation, having grown from our Vertical File (a file cabinet of brochures), the Directory of National Information Sources on Disability (a 2-volume printed directory), the Guide to Disability and Rehabilitation Periodicals (a printed resource), and the NARIC Bookmarks from the early days of the Internet. Use the Advanced Search page to search by words or phrases, specific titles or disabilities covered, or by state.
Learn more about how resources are screened and selected for inclusion in these collections.
Get to Know NIDILRR Grantees
One of NARIC’s core activities is managing information about current and completed projects funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR). We work with the grantees to collect information about their projects, publications and products resulting from their research, and their activities in the community.
Browse: You could start your journey through the work of the NIDILRR grantee community through two of our publications. Research In Focus highlights new and interesting findings from grantee studies presented in lay language summaries. Each summary is reviewed by the study authors for accuracy and includes additional resources to learn more about the topic. Right Resources, Right Now is a regular blog series we publish which curates “shovel-ready” resources produced by the grantees. These include guides, apps, videos, and much more. These posts are often tied to national observances or events such as Mental Health Awareness Month or World Running Day.
Explore: You could also get to know the grantees by exploring the current group two ways. Browse by Outcome Domain and Support Areas organizes the current grantees into Employment, Health and Function, Technology for Access and Function, Community Participation, Disability Demographics Capacity Building, Knowledge Translation, and ADA National Network. Browse by Funding Mechanism organizes the grantees into the types of projects: Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers, Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers, Disability and Rehabilitation Research Projects, Field Initiated Projects, Fellowships, Advanced Rehabilitation Research Training Centers, ADA National Network Regional Centers, and Small Business Innovation Research projects.
Dig Deeper: Visit the Program Database Advanced Search page to dig deep into the database which includes more than 3,000 records of current and completed projects. You can search by phrase or keyword, look for specific investigators, or see what’s funded in your state. Each project record includes a list of any publications we may have added to our literature collection. If you are a researcher interested in future funding opportunities, sign up for our NIDILRR Announcements list and hopefully we’ll see your next project in the database!
Explore Research Literature
NARIC is, at its heart, a library – one with actual books on actual shelves! The collection includes journal articles, original research from Federally funded projects, reference volumes, and research published in languages other than English. Everything in our collection is indexed in the REHABDATA database. With more than 250,000 records, it can be overwhelming to dive into this collection.
Browse: We add about 300 items to our collection each month and you can browse through each month’s addition by keyword group. It’s a great way to start exploring and get to know what we collect. You can also sign up for our REHABDATA Connection alert service to learn what we’ve added recently.
Explore: Our reSearch series gathers abstracts of research literature on a specific topic, pulling from REHABDATA, PubMed, ERIC, and other internationally recognized literature indexes. Issues of reSearch have explored very diverse topics such as autism and assistive technology, parenting with a disability, ethics in vocational rehabilitation, and bullying, to name just a few. reSearch is published in English and Spanish.
Dig Deeper: REHABDATA’s Advanced Search page gives you access to more than 250,000 abstracts of research literature. You can search by keyword or phrase, combine terms for a wider search, or exclude terms you don’t want. Your search can include or exclude international literature. You can also limit your search to our collection of downloadable documents. If you are conducting literature reviews, we recommend using the detailed report function to download your results to a spreadsheet-ready file. Learn more about how to get the most out of your REHABDATA search in our video series.
We hope this brief walkthrough is helpful in getting to know NARIC’s information resources. If you need any assistance in your search, please contact our information specialists by phone, email, chat, or through social media.