By Katie Ingrao, APRA-IL President and Associate Director of Prospect Management at Rush University Medical Center
New Year, new APRA-IL!
This year is all about revamping and refreshing our chapter and your career. We have an exciting year ahead of us with new events, a regional conference, and expanding partnerships in Chicago and beyond.
This will be my second year as President and the last year in my term. From the beginning, I’ve been committed to engaging a larger segment of our membership in volunteering on our committees and expanding the variety of programming we provide. This coming year, I believe the hard work invested by the Board of Directors and current volunteers will pay off big. In an effort to find ways to increase the accessibility of our programming beyond the Chicagoland area, we have acquired software in a partnership with APRA-MN to host and record webinars. This is an exciting development for us and will allow members to participate in events both in person and online. In addition to increasing accessibility to our members, the webinars will allow us to collaborate with professionals from other chapters and professions. Our first collaboration will be a webinar on competitive intelligence that we will run with APRA-MN and the Chicago Area Law Librarians during APRA International’s Share the Knowledge Week in February.
We are also thrilled to host the first ARC (APRA Regional Conference) this June in Chicago. This event will allow our members access to a multi-day conference that will not break the professional development budget. The call for speakers has been extended until the 18th and I encourage you to consider submitting a presentation. We at APRA-IL have impressive members and institutions and this is a perfect platform to showcase that.
As we revamp our programming we also are preparing for a refresh of our website and social media accounts. If you don’t follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, be sure to do that so you won’t miss the roll out. We will be updating our website content, improving the resources available to members, providing a more streamlined schedule of messaging to our members, and finally increasing our presence on social media to keep our members up to date on the latest events and news.
I am very proud of our chapter and its members and I hope to meet you at our next event. The calendar for the year is now available on our website. The first event of the year is a field trip to The Adler Planetarium for their January “Adler After Dark” series. More information can be found on the event page. Tickets should be purchased through the planetarium, but be sure to RSVP through our site so we have a head count. I am looking forward to the changes coming in 2016 and I hope you are too!
Best Wishes and a Happy New Year,
Katie Ingrao
APRA-IL President
