  Erasure-correcting codes, that support local repair of codeword symbols, have
attracted substantial attention recently for their application in distributed
storage systems. This paper investigates a generalization of the usual locally
repairable codes. In particular, this paper studies a class of codes with the
following property: any small set of codeword symbols can be reconstructed
(repaired) from a small number of other symbols. This is referred to as
cooperative local repair. The main contribution of this paper is bounds on the
trade-off of the minimum distance and the dimension of such codes, as well as
explicit constructions of families of codes that enable cooperative local
repair. Some other results regarding cooperative local repair are also
presented, including an analysis for the well-known Hadamard/Simplex codes.
