To support a wide range of efforts to understand the geographic context and historical conditions of the Indian residential schools sites for a wide range of stakeholders, Indigenous Services Canada has created a Web service to access and visualize historical aerial photography for those sites. The Historical aerial photography of Indian residential schools dataset contains digital scans of aerial photographs that were acquired from 1924 to 1998 over Indian Residential school sites and surrounding areas across Canada, as well as basic information about each photography and depicted site. The digital images were georeferenced, to match ground coordinates, saved in a resampled uncompressed raster format and compiled in a single mosaic layer. The dataset does not include the complete range of aerial photographs of each site. Instead, an attempt has been made to select a single optimal photograph for each site based on good photographic quality and the site's years of operation. In some cases no photograph is available, and in others a photograph was only available after the years of operation. The source scanned prints was obtained from the archives of the National Air Photo Library (NAPL) of Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN).

This dataset should be considered evergreen as new information and photography sources are identified.