John T. Ma

John T. Ma was born in Wenzhou, China, in 1920. With a scholarship from the Chungking Graduate School of Journalism, he came to the United States for advanced studies in 1947. After receiving his MA from the University of Wisconsin in 1948 and MS in Library Service from Columbia University in 1958.

Ma held a variety of positions that included Associate Librarian of the Missionary Research Library at Columbia University, Chinese Bibliographer-Cataloger at Cornell University Libraries, Curator-Librarian of East Asian Collection of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Director of the Library at the Sinological Institute of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and Chinese Librarian at the New York Public Library.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the National Taiwan University and Tamkang University in Taipei, and the East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is the founder and the first President of the European Association of Sinological Libraries. He is currently Visiting Professor of the Southeast University, Associate of University Seminar on Modern China at Columbia University, and Consultant of the Asia and Middle Eastern Division of the New York Public Library.

Ma has founded the Books-for-China Project, an organization that collects books and journals from retired professors, scholars, libraries, and publishers in the United States, and sends them to selected universities in China.