About the Founder
The DDel-C was created by Haley Dittbrenner '25, an intern and student manager at the Blough Weis Library. She first began her study of open access librarianship in November 2022, as a result of the United States Government crackdown on Z-Library. She was selected for the March Fellowship in Ethical Leadership, where she studied textbook piracy on Susquehanna University's campus. She has presented research at the Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Library Association, where she was the only undergraduate to do so. She first created the DDel-C in the fall of 2023 as a continuation of her March Fellowship project. Many students suggested open access as a solution to textbook piracy, and she wanted to provide such a program.
Haley intends to study open access librarianship and pursue a masters in library science, with aspirations of working in a university library. Outside of her work, she is a fiction writer.
I, Haley Dittbrenner, have seen firsthand what happens when students cannot access their textbooks. I have seen my classmates choose textbooks over meals, and when Z-Library was shut down, many people were left stranded, with no way to access books. I believe that we cannot solve textbook piracy unless we first solve the issue of inconvenient, inaccessible, and costly textbooks.
