Digitizing UNB Transcripts

Speakers: Julia Meneley and Trevor Thomas

In the 1999/FA term, the University of New Brunswick (UNB) transitioned to Colleague as its ERP system. While some academic records were imported during the migration, not all historical data made the move. As a result, UNB has maintained two transcript workflows for the past 27 years: pre‑1999/FA transcripts stored as text on a server, and post‑1999/FA transcripts generated by a UNIDATA routine using current academic information in Colleague. When an official transcript request required both sources, staff in the Registrar’s Office were left to manually merge and format the data.

With New Brunswick institutions shifting to MyCreds, UNB took the opportunity to modernize this process. The archived text files were parsed using a Python script—an effort complicated by inconsistent formats and language variations (yes, we tried AI; no, it did not help). Several T‑SQL table‑valued functions were then developed to replicate the existing UNIDATA logic and unify it with the archived data. To make this work accessible, an API was built to securely expose these functions to web applications, allowing the combined data to be used for automated transcript PDF generation.

This project replaced a long‑standing manual task with a maintainable and fully digital solution.

Learning Objectives:

  • Understanding the challenges and risks of long-term data fragmentation.
  • Learning practical techniques for parsing and normalizing inconsistent historical data.
  • Learning communication techniques with non-technical stakeholders to ensure data and document outputs are accurate, accessible, and trusted.

Speaker Bios:

Julia Meneley is a Data Developer with Information Technology Services at the University of New Brunswick. She specializes in building data solutions that support accurate reporting, analytics, and operational decision-making. Her current work involves expanding UNB’s ETL pipelines and improving data consistency across systems to create a more cohesive and sustainable institutional data environment.

Trevor Thomas is a Full Stack Developer with Information Technology Services at the University of New Brunswick. He specializes in application development, application integration and database administration as well as supplying first class service desk support for the University at large.