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.

The process of discovering appropriate resources in digital libraries within universities is important, as it can have a big effect on whether retrieved works are useful to the requester. The improvement of the user experience with the digital library of the University of Novi Sad dissertations (PHD UNS) through the personalization of search results representation is the aim of the research presented in this paper. There are three groups of PHD UNS digital library users: users from the academic community, users outside the academic community, and librarians who are in charge of entering dissertation data. Different types of textual and visual representations were analyzed, and representations which needed to be implemented for the groups of users of PHD UNS digital library were selected. After implementing these representations and putting them into operation in April 2017, the user interface was extended with functionality that allows users to select their desired style for representing search results using an additional module for storing message logs. The stored messages represent an explicit change in the results representation by individual users. Using these message logs and ELK technology stack, we analyzed user behavior patterns depending on the type of query, type of device, and search mode. The analysis has shown that the majority of users of the PHD UNS system prefer using the textual style of representation rather than the visual. Some users have changed the style of results representation several times and it is assumed that different types of information require a different representation style. Also, it has been established that the most frequent change to the visual results representation occurs after users perform a query which shows all the dissertations from a certain time period and which is taken from the advanced search mode; however, there is no correlation between this change and the client’s device used.

This study proposes six steps that scientific institutions should undertake to increase the visibility and accessibility of their dissertations; these steps were implemented in the digital library of the University of Novi Sad. An analysis was conducted thereafter to evaluate the success, and it was found that the six steps and associated strategies were successful, with 400,000 downloads having been performed since the digital library was operational. Although this study presents six steps for improving electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) discoverability in the digital library at the University of Novi Sad, these steps can easily be customized and implemented for ETD digital libraries at any scientific institution.