  We consider the locality of encoding and decoding operations in distributed
storage systems (DSS), and propose a new class of codes, called locally
encodable and decodable codes (LEDC), that provides a higher degree of
operational locality compared to currently known codes. For a given locality
structure, we derive an upper bound on the global distance and demonstrate the
existence of an optimal LEDC for sufficiently large field size. In addition, we
also construct two families of optimal LEDC for fields with size linear in code
length.
