Here is a paragraph from the University of Oregon Holden Leadership Center on record keeping during meetings:

As you can see, the role of a secretary is more than "just taking minutes". The secretary is in effect, the historian. What he/she records will be referred to by current members as a reminder of finished and unfinished business, what needs follow-up and what actions were taken. It will also be kept for future members to read to gain an understanding of where the organization has been and why. Many organizations make it the secretary's responsibility to notify the membership about upcoming meetings-time, date, location-as well as any important items to be discussed.

Many business meetings, particularly important ones, will keep minutes with a stenographer, and government business meetings are no exception. Minutes of a meeting are useful for the principals to later refer to as an aide-memoire, to reference in the event of a later dispute of what was said by whom; for sharing with non-attending staff, possibly even for eventual publication for some types of organizations, there are a wide variety of reasons why minute-keeping is a common practice. Minutes are kept for many meetings, whether the governing board of the local floral society, all the way to the highest government councils, committees, and cabinets.

What is more interesting, is that in the modern era, there exists a delicate balance between keeping minutes or particularly audio and audiovisual recording of important meetings and deliberate obfuscation of such records. The infamous White House audio taping system was used to fix Nixon's responsibility, "what did you know and when did you know it" during the Watergate crisis and was instrumental in forcing him from office.

Watergate and the role of the taping system in bringing down a Presidency was definitely noted by later politicians of all parties. Part of the art of modern government is to keep the President and other important and public figures from being pinned down to a position, or to having learned a particular bit of knowledge. This permits "plausible deniability" in the event of a crisis. The leader can be vague or deny knowing about the decisions that led to the crisis, and on occasion, a convenient subordinate can be thrown to the wolves of the media or the legal system.

Look at the controversy over the use of personal, non-governmental email by some well-known public officials. Government records are almost always preserved and archived, and they are subject to subpoenas during judicial or congressional investigations. In the event of a scandal or crisis gone bad, without good records, a leader can testify with a high degree of vagueness or ignorance: "Of course if I had warning that this terrible event might happen, I would have taken action to prevent it."