Contact the alumni association of your university. Some schools, like Ohio University, offer PDF versions of past university yearbooks free of charge on their website courtesy of the alumni association. You may be able to view your yearbook online or download a copy to your computer if your school also offers this service.
Visit your school's website. Cornell University, for example, has a specific website for current and previous editions of the Cornell yearbook that offers editions for purchase. Harvard University also has a specific yearbook site where alumni can purchase past yearbooks. Also, students who purchased a yearbook but never picked it up can have it mailed to them for a nominal fee.
Look for old copies of yearbooks on eBay, which has a wealth of old yearbooks available for purchase. Some of the yearbooks cost very little, but some older versions can be pricy. You can search for your specific university yearbook by entering the name of your school, or do a more specific search by entering your school name plus "yearbook." At the end of 2010, a 1950 edition of the University of Virginia Cavalier Daily Yearbook was available for under $20 and a 1911 Columbia University Yearbook was $75.
Contact the school bookstore of your university. The Bobcat, which is the school store of Ohio University, has copies of school yearbooks available for purchase dating back to 1982.
Visit your university library's website. Virginia Commonwealth University's library has cover-to-cover, full-color digitalized editions of yearbooks dating back to 1931 that can be read online and downloaded to your computer for future reference. Versions are also available for downloading to a Kindle.
Purchase a subscription to an Internet yearbook site such as E-Yearbook.com. This site offers yearbooks from universities throughout the U.S. and you can search before you pay the annual membership fee--$29.50 as of December 2010--to see if the edition you're seeking is available. After registering and paying the fee, you can browse full-color, digitalized versions of your yearbook.
Search Biblio.com, which has a wide variety of rare and used books. Enter your university's name and yearbook into the search box to see if a copy of it is available for purchase.