Staff Spotlight:
Mai-Leng Ong Title and branch: Senior Materials Specialist, Materials Management at HCLS Administrative Branch. My work involves developing and maintaining the Art Education, Adult Nonfiction, and World Languages Collections. How long have you been with HCLS? I have been working with HCLS for more than 21 years and have enjoyed being here since day one! What excites you the most about your work and HCLS as a whole? I love my work tremendously because I can serve the community through my selections with a wide range of materials for the community’s reading pleasures as well as educational and self-directed learning of our customers. HCLS is great place to work. The staff at HCLS are very creative and are committed to providing excellent resources and services to the entire community in Howard County. How are you involved in the community? I am involved with helping immigrants in our community. I help them to find needed resources and share information with them as they settle in this county and country. What’s an unusual fact about you? I am a second-generation Chinese born in Malaysia. It is a multi-ethnic country and because of this, I can speak three other languages besides English. Since Malaysia is a multicultural country, I learned from an early age to appreciate people from diverse backgrounds and to try to understand their cultures. Favorite sport and/or sports team? I love to bike, and I ride the tandem with my husband. One of the highlights is to ride the annual Seagull Century [100 miles] over in Salisbury, MD. Recently, we rode The Great
Alleghany Passage [Gap Trail] on our vacation. For the first time, I crossed the Eastern Continental Divide on our tandem! What was your first job? My first job was at the Computer Science Center [CSC] Library at the University of Maryland at College Park. I was one of the two librarians at CSC, and we served the students using the computer science lab. I was also responsible for cataloging the technical reports by the faculty of the Computer Science Department using the ACM classification system. Favorite time of year? I love the cool fall weather around here. It is a beautiful time of the year to watch the leaves turn to various sheds of orange and gold. Fall invigorates me because of cool crisp air where I can spend a lot of time outside, walking along trails, and biking after the summer heat. What's your favorite place to travel? I have many favorite places to visit. I love Istanbul and Eastern Europe. There is so much history and beauty over there. I would love to go back again to visit places that I have not been able to cover on our previous trips.
HCLS ADULT SUMMER READING CHALLENGE Summer Reading is back and better than ever! Give yourself some time to read, relax and learn this summer by participating in our Adult Summer Reading Challenge. We encourage you to read in whatever format you like the most: audiobooks, eBooks, graphic novels, and hold-inyour-hands books — they all count towards your summer reading goal! Get started at hclibrary.org/summer. FOLLOW US:
hclibrary.org
7
7
