Minutes are a written record of a meeting.
This seems simple enough, but there are many different ways that minutes can be written and this will largely depend upon the type of meeting. There can hardly be any meeting which is actually a verbatim record. Hansard, the official record of the proceedings of the UK Parliament appears to report all speeches, interventions, questions, answers and recorded votes and the times of each. But even Hansard is not verbatim. Not only does it not reproduce the actual topic for discussion, other than as a heading, but neither does it always reproduce exactly what was said.