By Cheryl Ong & Nicholas Yong

YOU can now take the library wherever you go.

Library users with Internet-enabled cellphones can now visit the library's Web portal to search for books and also to check when books are due to be returned.

They can also renew their book loans or reserve books currently unavailable.

Snappily entitled 'Library in your Pocket', the portal aims to make it easy for people on the go to access these library services, said National Library Board project manager Lilian Chua.

In cellphone-mad Singapore, it 'is the most logical device to base the portal on', she said during a briefing earlier this week.

The portal is available at http://m.nlb.gov.sg and will be on trial until January.

With the portal able to tell library users when their books are due to be returned, the NLB hopes a long-standing problem of unpaid fines and fees will be alleviated.

In an effort to tackle the issue, library members with unpaid fines were last month barred from checking out any more books or materials, while in February, a flood of reminder notices went out to errant members.

As of May1, more than $900,000 in owed fines had been recovered, but this makes up only about 13per cent of the $6.5million owed to the library as at Jan15.

Since February, about 270,000 errant members have paid up, leaving a further 430,000 members still in arrears - some with debts going back years.

In response to queries from The Straits Times, an NLB spokesman said the response to the policy so far had been 'encouraging'.

Asked whether NLB would go so far as to permanently bar errant members from borrowing books, or even send debt collectors after them, she said there were no plans to do so.

More mailers will be sent out from July, this time to users who owe more than 30cents for three months or more. They will be charged an extra dollar if a second reminder is sent to them.

Meanwhile, the Web portal, which had its unofficial debut in February, has received nearly 1,000 comments from users. Tweaks have been made: For example, the design has been made less cluttered so the portal pages load faster on cellphones.

Accessing the portal and its services costs nothing, but data charges will apply.

To download a link to the portal as a bookmark in your cellphone, SMS 'mnlb' to 9184-2014.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.