Minutes Are Made, Not Taken
Converting talk into a written record is no small task. "Talk with all its complexities, disfluencies, ambiguities, and occasional disarray" has to become a settled account of who said what, as sociologist David R. Gibson writes.
His conclusion is sharper than the usual grumble about note-taking: minutes are not merely taken but actively made, and the people writing them are minute-makers, sometimes with input from others. What gets preserved is a reconstruction, not a transcript.
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This isn't only a historian's problem. So much news depends on anonymous sources that how private conversations get compressed into records matters for a functioning democracy too.
And the trap is presentational: Gibson notes that minutes often have the appearance of a verbatim report, which invites readers to treat them as one.