Arkady V. Sokolov – a scholar, senior colleague, friend and unique personality

The article is a tribute to Arkady Vasilyevich Sokolov, Russian scientist, professor, Doctor of Science in pedagogy, researcher in the field of librarianship, informatics and social communications theory. Beside the professional relations, there was friendship of many years between Sokolov and the author. The author follows the main stages of Sokolov’s biography and his academic career, discusses his professional interests, namely informatics, bibliography, library science, metatheory of social communications, theory of sociocultural activities, teaching of bibliosphere and bibliologos, and library intelligentsia. He also reviews several publications by Arkady Sokolov. The author remembers A. V. Sokolov’s participation in RNPLS&T’s conferences, i.e. “Crimea” conference (world forum), “LIBCOM” international conference, and “BiblioPiter” conference. A. V. Sokolov contributed a lot to the Scientific and Technical Libraries journal as a member of editorial board, permanent author and reviewer. He made his fair share of contribution to the RNPLS&T joint monograph “E-librarianship”, unfortunately, only the introduction was written, which the author cites.