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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the digital library usage patterns as a means of improving the system, as well as the user experience, to give appropriate recognition to the most popular dissertations’ authors and to measure the interest of non-academic users for dissertations defended at the University of Novi Sad (UNS). Design/methodology/approach: A logging module of the digital library of theses and dissertations of University of Novi Sad (PHD UNS) application has been implemented. The module recorded the messages relating to the search queries and downloads over a three-year period from 2017–2019. These logs are analysed using the Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) technology stack and the results are shown using graphs and tables. Findings: The analysis determined the perfect time for weekly maintenance of the system, defined a recommendation for improving the system and revealed the most popular dissertations. A significant number of downloads and queries originated from citizens, i.e. users outside the academic community. Practical implications: The conducted analysis defined recommendations for the system improvement which can be used by PHD UNS research and development (R&D) team and revealed the most popular dissertations which are used for the promotion of its authors through faculties’ websites. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of ELK based log analysis of a Serbian language documents’ repository. Besides, the value of results for the PHD UNS R&D team and UNS rector team, the study proves that PhD digital library presents an important Open Science communication channel for presenting scientific results to the citizens. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.