President Obama’s first official act on taking office was to issue a series of memos and executive orders to promote transparency in government and reverse a pattern he maintained had cloaked Washington in secrecy.

One outcome is an unusual online effort that launched this week on the White House’s Web site to solicit public comment on how to change the government’s classification and declassification policies.

The administration is accepting recommendations and comments through July 10 with an eye toward addressing a backlog of 400 million pages of information housed at the National Archives and Records Administration that is inaccessible to the public.

The White House has struggled at times to balance its vows of openness and transparency with intelligence gathering and executive branch prerogatives.

Groups that track government secrecy have complained that an 2003 executive order issued by President George W. Bush has led to overzealous classification of documents that were supposed to released with limited review after 25 years.

Bush’s order — which modified ground rules for classification first established by President Bill Clinton in 1995 — gave officials such as the secretary of Health and Human Services power to classify information as secret. The administration characterized the effort as a reflection of how counterterrorism duties were subsuming domestic agencies into the national security apparatus.

Obama’s push for openness is intended to reevaluate the classification system, outline steps to encourage information-sharing and archive the growing volume of digital records.

Early suggestions that have been posted on the White House site include issuing a new executive order designed for electronic records, creating incentives for government officials to produce material at the lowest classification levels and creating a central database for declassified documents.

Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said that although people have been complaining about abuse of the national security classification system for decades, complaints have rarely translated into real policy changes.

He predicted that an overhaul will require a careful independent review of each government agency’s classification guidelines, which specify exactly what information is placed off-limits.

Administration officials are expected to issue a directive or series of orders aimed at loosening the government’s system for classifying national security information.

Still, the administration has drawn criticism on other fronts — particularly for continuing to resist an effort by the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to force the president to release White House visitors logs.

The group, among other things, is trying to assess to what extent health care executives have influenced the administration’s plans to overhaul the U.S. health system.