Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are a class of codes designed for the local correction of erasures. They have received considerable attention in recent years due to their applications in distributed storage. Most existing results on LRCs do not explicitly take into consideration the field size $q$, i.e., the size of the code alphabet. In particular, for the binary case, only a few results are known. In this work, we present an upper bound on the minimum distance $d$ of linear LRCs with availability, based on the work of Cadambe and Mazumdar. The bound takes into account the code length $n$, dimension $k$, locality $r$, availability $t$, and field size $q$. Then, we study binary linear LRCs in three aspects. First, we focus on analyzing the locality of some classical codes, i.e., cyclic codes and Reed-Muller codes, and their modified versions, which are obtained by applying the operations of extend, shorten, expurgate, augment, and lengthen. Next, we construct LRCs using phantom parity-check symbols and multi-level tensor product structure, respectively. Compared to other previous constructions of binary LRCs with fixed locality or minimum distance, our construction is much more flexible in terms of code parameters, and gives various families of high-rate LRCs, some of which are shown to be optimal with respect to their minimum distance. Finally, availability of LRCs is studied. We investigate the locality and availability properties of several classes of one-step majority-logic decodable codes, including cyclic simplex codes, cyclic difference-set codes, and $4$-cycle free regular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We also show the construction of a long LRC with availability from a short one-step majority-logic decodable code.