In the end I was able to get IDA to load this elf file (its a debug build of a PlayStation 3 game) and read the DWARF debug info at the same time. And I was able to find a debug build of an xbox 360 game by the same developers that contains a PDB file and that happens to use the particular library code I was interested in.
So with the combination of the PS3 game debug build and the 360 game debug build (and some other code and things from this same developer that are out there) I am making progress on reverse engineering this library (its code for reading an archive format used by games from this developer and I want to make a tool for working with said archive format
